Visually impaired friendly computer

[businessnews]

I'm still going through the hard task of picking the right small business idea so that I can get a little extra income to help me paying the bills.

After much debate and several weeks of research I'm convinced I should bare in mind four main guidelines to be successful:

- love my job
- target a niche market
- sell quality products/services at low prices
- marketing

Therefore, having graduated in computer science and loving the IT business I came up with the idea of selling a visually impaired friendly computer supported by available (possibly enhanced) open source software and low price embedded hardware so that these people find it as confortable as possible to achieve daily tasks as browsing the Internet, sending/receiving email, writing documents and the like. As far as I know there's already lots of proprietary software selling good on this market, however my point was to provide a fully out of the box product which people could simply press a button and start using without any further obstacles but a simple on site basic formation.

I could also charge for remote helpdesk through voice messaging software.

I guess I fill the first three goals, but I guess marketing would be slightly difficult in this particular case.

Could this work?

I think so - check out Accessibility: target.com Lawsuit. The internet is getting used more and more everyday. The more people that can use it, business increase and this is good for the economy.

[sarilyn]

Hi, I think you're idea's great. I'm blind and so I use screen reading software to access my computer, so I think a computer that's accessible in itself would be great, especially if it was affordable.

The only thing is, I'm not sure how you'd go about making one. Blind/low-vision people use a wide variety of software programs (word processors, productivity software, e-mail clients, internet browsers, MP3/media programs, etc.) Your computer would need to have good screen-reading and/or magnification capabilities that work with all these types of programs, including whichever operating system the computer will be using. Also, if you use open-source programs they'd need to be compatible with other programs, so someone using your computer could receive and read documents in standard formats, and send documents that can be read in standard formats by other people.

I hope you don't think I'm trying to dis your idea, I really want it to work. Although I use technology I don't have a clue about how it works, and you've probably thought about all the stuff I've said here anyway. If you can make it work that's GREAT! Good luck, and take care.