For seeing persons, compare the situation of the blind with the following: you are used to go to your local supermarket, and nearly to find everything you need on the shelves by almost walking asleep (you know what to find where). At a certain day, everything is changed: the name of the store, the products inside, the position of the products on the shelves, the shelves themselves, the several departments (bakery, vegetables, …) everything you can think of is changed. Unfortunately you are forced to wander through the store without having an overview of the store, no scanning of the shelves with the eyes, … After a mornth, you are used to the new store and products and their place in the store, everything changes again and you can start all over again. Isn't this a nightmare? Well, that's what the blind are forced to do every time a website, a programme, … changes.

In fact, I should post this to the accessible googlegroup.

Best, Katty

    I think that maybe blind people are not against change for the sake of change but it's the fear that their old favorite programs won't work and how accessable will the new os be or how accessable will the new programs be.  I to did like windows xp with outlook express and when I was concitering upgrading to windows 7 I was hesitent because I did not know what email program would work and be accessable.  I did of course upgrade and used windows live mail and when I began to have issues with it I went to thunderbird and I now have windows 10 and I still use thunderbird.  I think that the reason that we all like outlook express isthat it is just a simple email program with nobells and whistles like calendars or features that we don't need or can't use.  Outlook express will always be the best email program but we have adapted to other programs but that does not mean that we are happy with them we just adjust.  We all don't like change but we can and do adapt but we don't like it.  With new versions of windows there may be features that we don't need or want or we can't use but we use what we want to use or what we can use.  I know that every one has their screen reader of choice and they think that theirs is the best I use nvdathen there is the issue of winamp it's no longer supported but I still have not been convinced that there is a better program so I will just keep using it.  We should upgrade if we need to but we chould not have change fordced upon us this should be our choice.  Think of the Omish people they don't have cars they still use horse and buggies that is their choice and so is somones choice if they still use windows xp if they are willing to take the risk thats their choice and not ours. 
Brian Sackrider  

Change is hard, but we must adjust.  I wasn't fond of Win 7 when I got this computer, but I have adjusted.  When a colleague told me how to find and put terms into the search bar by hitting the Start button, much frustration has been saved.  Now, I'm comtemplating doing the upgrade to Win 10.  I just wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into before doing it.

Pauline

On 4/18/2016 6:27 PM, Brian Vogel wrote:

Rosemarie Chavarria wrote, in regard to a friend of hers who insisted on staying with WinXP, "I asked him why and his answer was that it was simpler to work with."

And I can't count the times I've heard this, about way more than Windows, and thought, "No, it's not easier to work with - it's what you're used to."  Win XP was an OS I loved and Microsoft has the annoying habit of alternating "good" and "bad" versions of Windows.  The number of things that require manual intervention from the user in XP is huge compared to later versions, particularly Windows 7 forward.  And, when it comes down to it, even in the "ugly" versions of Windows the similarities to their predecessors is at least as strong as the differences, but the differences are where people are required to learn something new.

David Moore's comments regarding those who live to be 100, or near it, really resonate with me.  My grandmother died in the 1990s and was in her 90s at the time. When I think about what technology was at her birth and the amount of change she and her age cohort had to go through I am amazed.  I don't know if I could be as flexible as they were.  While the pace of change has picked up, particularly in the cyber world, the majority of changes I've lived through (I'm just short of 54 years old) feel to me much more like refinements on very familiar themes rather than complete divergences from what came before.  That was not true for my grandparents at all, and my parents experienced more revolutionary changes than I have, too.  I think my only two revolutions were the introduction of the personal computer and the ascendance of the internet.

Brian