Talk about a lack of vision!
A Samsung patent lawsuit that was overturned today in a German court
sought to prevent Apple from making it easy for blind iPhone users to
access the VoiceOver feature -- a text-to-speech app so essential that
the National Federation for the Blind gave it an award.
Tech watchers said stretching the patent battle to such a feature was simply bad business.
The battle revolved around a German patent Samsung holds on pressing a
button to activate a text-to-speech feature. To make its phones
accessible to blind users out of the box, a triple tap on the phone's
only front button launches the VoiceOver feature
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Had the injunction been granted, Apple would have had to come up with
some other way to easily activate VoiceOver on iPhones in Germany, said
Chris Danielson of the National Federation for the Blind.
“That would have been a real hardship for blind iPhone users,” he
told FoxNews.com. “If you can’t see the touch screen, you can’t go into
settings and all the other normal things to activate VoiceOver. That’s
why Apple included this triple button press; any blind person could pick
up an iPhone and interact with it.”
Danielson, who is himself blind, is one of many iPhone users who has
come to rely on the feature. His organization awarded Apple the Dr.
Jacob Bolotin Award for VoiceOver, and for the company's overall efforts
to make technology accessible to the disabled. Those efforts have paid
off, he said.
“Blind people who have them love them,” he said. “There’s quite a lot of enthusiasm for the iPhone among blind people.”
Reached for comment by AllThingsDigital, Samsung defend its right to
defend its patents. “For decades, we have heavily invested in pioneering
the development of technological innovations in the mobile industry,
which have been constantly reflected in our products,” a company
spokesman said. “We continue to believe that Apple has infringed our
patented mobile technologies, and we will continue to take the measures
necessary to protect our intellectual property rights.”
Intellectual property activist turned analyst Florian Mueller of the popular Foss Patents website agreed that Samsung’s efforts to protect its patents may have crossed a line.
website agreed that Samsung’s efforts to protect its patents may have crossed a line.
“I can't say anything positive about its offensive assertions from a
business ethics point of view,” he wrote. “From a certain angle the
voiceover patent suit is the worst [such patent lawsuit] because it's an
attempt -- thwarted for the time being, but not dismissed forever -- to
hold vision-impaired German Apple customers hostage.”
“I don't think Samsung is evil. I really don't. But it should give
more thought to the wider implications of its retaliatory actions
against Apple,” he said.
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