Hi,
I honestly think it's rediculous. Even the up and coming chicken nugget client from Q, the guy behind qwitter, will have a demo, and a one-time, fifteen dollar fee, and a ton of features. Will I be buying it? I don't know yet. I'm still using the new qube version and that gets me by fine.
I use facebook on iOS but not too much, as they keep changing stuff. I find it rather annoying, but this doesn't justify 25 dollars a year and definitely not fifty! I'd quite honestly rather upgrade my dropbox space to 50 gb than pay for some company's attempt at this marketing stunt.

What would make SocialEyes worth it's weight in cash is if they would take a feature from the iOS and port it over. That feature is the ability to voice chat with your Facebook friends, which, as I understand it, can't be done from the mobile page.

I'm also coming in a bit late, but I'll put my two cents on the table. It's actually about 2 dollars, since it's quite a long rant, but I hope those who agree with me like it. This is just my opinion, I'm not trying to tell anyone else what they should do.
I do fully understand why GW Micro is charging for this, I don't understand where the $25 yearly fee comes from. A 1-time $5 or $10 fee would be just fine. Or maybe you could go dirt cheap and give people the option of $1.99 for 1 year, or something. And a 30 day trial so you can tell if it really works for you... There are so many things wrong with this. Perhaps it's because there aren't many blind people who would purchase these products, but by using that strategy, they're turning many of those potential buyers off. If they just thought a little more, they'd realize that all of the people who are haters of this product, would actually consider buying it if they had more friendly pricing on it, and they'd probably get a lot more money in the long run. But, in a typical business model, they get to do pretty much what they want, well at lesat that's my impression anyway, so our chances of changing that aren't too high.
Price doesn't dictate how much profits you get. It only establishes a bass value of which to work with. What really decides if it's a pass or fail is the quality of the product, the usefulness of the product, and setting up a fair price for the product that many feel is reasonable. Thus if you put a high price tag on a product and expect to get high profits from that high price alone. Well, guess what? Only a handful of people will buy it. Some of those people will be generous, lazy, easily persuaded, or plain desperate and can't wait for something else to be found. Other people will just get it for convenience reasons, because they can already afford it. And a few others won't buy it, either because they can't afford it, or because they resent the high price. Instead they'll crack it, or have someone else buy it for them. Or they just won't buy it at all, which is really the best option for people in that situation.
Now I'm not saying that people who buy GW products are lazy, easily persuaded, or rich. I'm not one to judge. However, when you really get down to it, freedom Scientific gets most if not all of its money from agencies who can afford a purchase of Jaws, because the average blind person can't aford it from their own bank account. And for the really thick headed people who think that we just need to stop whining and deal with it, I have reasons why it's just wrong and why something needs to be done about it.
Nowadays there are organizations who want blind people to integrate with the sighted world. However, there are areas we will need help with, whether you're sighted or not. But, almost everyone is expected to have a computer. For a sighted person, that's no problem. Go to a computer store and just buy a cheap PC that's powerful enough to allow for simple tasks like using E-mail, browsing the Internet, and typing important documents. If you want more, you pay a few more bucks for a more expensive PC that'll do more demanding tasks more easily. Either way, a big question arises. Sighted people don't go through government assisted agencies to get their computers working, and monitors for computers are very reasonably priced. By reasonably, I mean I got a new PC with monitor, keyboard, mouse, Win 7 64 bit, a reasonable speed duel core processor, a 1 TB hard drive, and I believe 4 GB of ram, for less than $300. Of course the monitor is useless to me, so I'd need a screen reader... guess what? Jaws costs at least 3 times as much as my new computer! And from what I've been reading, Window Eyes does too.
So, let's see. I don't know how much money was spent purchasing Jaws 4.0 for me way back in the day, and I certainly don't know how much went into the upgrades that brought my license up to Version 13. But it was probably quite a bit of money. If I suddenly became sighted in 10 minutes and got all that money back, and wanted to spend it on nothing but the equivalent of a screen reader in the sighted world, what would I be able to get? Hmm, a huge duel monitor with very high resolution support maybe? I could game with it without trouble, even with really intensive games. I could look at things with staggering detail, and make things so big and grand enough to fill up a large chunk of the room the PC was in. Or, I could pay $500 on a decent monitor, and spend the rest on a decent video card that would still give me tons of power I didn't have before. I'd have so much to be dangerous; reading e-mail, documents, web pages, most of that would be less than child's play on this grand setup.
But instead, in the real world, all that money I spent in the sighted world on those awesome video components goes on a good screen reader that is equivalent to the input the average joe with average equipment receives with their eyes. Somebody please tell me I'm wrong!
So, what gives? Yes Jaws has a ton of features, but there are tons of free programs with tons of features... take NvDA, for instance. Even so, there's probably a long list of things that would make people want Jaws over NVDA. But, how on Earth can they justify a $1000 price tag for Jaws, just to be so much better than the freebies? I'd certainly pay a price for Jaws, I'm not one of those who think that Jaws should be free. But I know the price is too much when I realize just how behind the times some of these accessibility things are.
Now, that was an extraordinarily extreme example of my feelinngs on this matter. Back to social Eyes, the price difference isn't quite so exxtreme, as in today's world, all the same you could still buy a few video games with that. Which I still have a problem with. And really, this is why companies that only serve the blind community, are destined to fail. they don't have enough users to keep a profit so they raise prices, either because they don't care about it, or because they have no other choice. I can't say I like everythign about apple, but at least they got accessibility right.
Again, I'm not trying to say that buying Jaws, Window Eyes, Social Eyes, any of those types of things, is wrong. I won't hate anyone for buying  any of those things. I'm just more than a little irritated at the business model these products are being sold with, and so refuse to support it.

Hi.

Wow, well if they actually said that about Apple, well I'll never give them another cent, and won't recommend any of there products to others. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh but what kind of a company are they? No better than Freedom Scientific.

Yep I wonder the same thing. Who in their right mind says that putting a screen reader on an operating system by default is a big disservice to the blind community? Do they assume that just because the screen reader comes with the OS, that it won't be as good as something GW Micro could make? I'm betting that's what they want us to think. So, i guess by their line of thinking, voice Over shouldn't be on IOS devices. so, let's say GW Micro made Voice Over. Judging by how things on the desktop side of things are, you'd probably pay $500 for the Voice over ap, easily. Or would they call it Mobile Eyes? who knows? And really, that's kinda beside the point... Voice Over is probably one of the best screen readers I have ever seen for an operating system. Whoever made that claim about disservicing the blind community needs a real wake-up call.

As to the disservice issue GW Micro did say that, and the reasoning was that VoiceOver and these other integrated screen readers like Orca or Narrator will never be good as Window-Eyes because GW Micro works on Window-Eyes full time to service the needs of blind computer users where supposedly Apple doesn't.

The problem I have with that logic is they are literally comparing two different accessibility architectures and claiming theirs is the superior one because Window-Eyes requires more work to make Windows accessible than VoiceOver does to make Apple work. The completely overlooked the point that since the introduction of Cocoa for Apple any application using the standard widgets and toolkits will have VoiceOver access built-in from the beginning where on Windows screen reader developers use a miriod of complex techniques to get access to the content from MSAA, UI Automation, video intercept drivers, scripts, and a tun of other crap that just isn't necessary on Apple's Mac OS or iOS platforms. In short, GW Micro is just slinging mud and hoping it will stick and people who don't know any better will believe them.

It should be mentioned that Linux too has an accessibility framework similar to the way Apple's works. We have the GTK+ toolkit, which passes all information to an intermediate accessibility bridge called at-spi, that then passes the information on to Orca for speech or braille output. The advantages here are huge. Anyone developing an app for Gnome 3.x with GTK+ using standard widgets etc is bound to have a high degree of accessibility right out of the box just because GTK+ has two-way communication with the Orca screen reader through at-spi. We don't need a lot of the scripting and video intercept drivers that Window-Eyes needs to gain access to the desktop and apps because Gnome 3.8 is designed to integrate as seamlessly as possible with the Orca screen reader which doesn't require all that extra overhead. However, interesting enough Orca does offer scripting ability through Python, and that allows someone to extend the Orca functionality as needed.

So as to the issue of integrating a screen reader into an operating system being a disservice to the blind that's bull crap. Of course, GW Micro has to say that, because if they endorsed VoiceOver, Orca, etc publicly it would be bad for their screen reader business.

I actually disagree. I think VoiceOver is actually superior to any screen reader experience I've ever had on a PC. Consider Jaws 14, which has been out for almost a year. I was given a copy of microsoft office 2013 and while it's somewhat usable with Jaws 14, there is only minimal support for it. Since VoiceOver is updated right along with the mac OS, you get screen reader support for programs as they update, not years after the fact. By the time Jaws has full support for office 2013, the next office will be coming out, and it will then become obselete again.

I think the problems that VoiceOver has (on both iOS and OS X) really do just annoy power users, because if they didn't then an alternative (at least for OS X) would, in keeping with the hypothetical of free-market capitalism, materialise. It hasn't, so I assume we're still hoping Apple would fix the annoying bugs.

Being in Europe, I'm probably unusual in thinking that we should not eliminate bundled software for the sake of competitors.  What Microsoft did with IE was undoubtedly inexcusable, but Apple isn't close to that milepost yet.  And I don't hear people here or anywhere else giving Microsoft credit for upgrading Narrator in Windows 8 to the point that many people can, in fact, now use it quite successfully.  Microsoft knows full well that it has its ankles tied just because it's dominant, while Apple isn't.  So if people at Apple want to fix VoiceOver, they really can fix it.  That they don't is precisely the indication that, at least for now, it's a good enough screen reader.  I'm fairly sure it could be better too, though not for the same reasons.  Again though, the power is in your (or anybody else's) hands to write something better.  I know that I have considered it, but it's not happening, so I have to assume I believe Apple can be persuaded to fix it.  I do agree with you that VoiceOver on OS X, and in fact OS X in general, may not get the love it deserves nowadays.  This is troubling, but I think Apple is in a very good position (at least today) to minimise the amount of work it does while still providing a vast majority of users with very good accessibility.  If in five years time Apple is forced to justify to a government agency how it is meeting legislative guidelines, you can be sure that blind people or their advocates will not allow Apple's marketing campaign to supersede reality.

god i don't miss this kind of stuff. ever since i bought my iphone and mac and ipad i have never looked back. I bought a 99 C app on my mac that allows me to have complete access to facebook in a tab that i can pull up with one keystroke from anywhere. These companies do not have a clue and if they plan on surviving they are going to have to change their directions very quickly. I mean even 15 years ago. 1200 bucks for a piece of software? How can this be justified. Most professional software in many industries costs less. What a joke

Just to clarify, we have NVDA now, and it just got support for document revisions in microsoft word and configuration profiles, so it's definitely on par with commercial offerings these days.
    More seriously, I'm not saying that Mac Voiceover is a disservice, merely using it as an example that many people are familiar with.  I have many complaints with it, but here is not the place.  It was merely a vector for a hypothetical example to explain my reasoning for not automatically considering it a service.  In all honesty, windows 8 narrator has me more nervous: if it gets good enough to stop NVDA and commercial screen reader development, we may have a problem; I don't trust Microsoft to continue developing it for the long run, and it could possibly become the first example in another 5 or so years.  In all honesty, there aren't enough examples of integrated screen readers to make this clear-cut, at least to me.
    Being open source does indeed help a lot, of course.  This is, imho, Android's advantage.

At camlorn: having used windows 8 for quite some time, i can say that narator has a lot of potential. The voices lag a bit, but as far as features go, it's on par with voiceover on IOS in my oppinion. The capslock is the equivalent of the voiceover key in this case. It has pretty good support for metro apps in windows 8, and you can brouz the web with it, and work in office and be productive with it. Just use espeak for the sapi voice and you pretty much have a fully functional screen reader. Of course it doesn't have ocr, or anything fancy like that, but in all honesty, someone could use it as a primary screenreader if they didn't know any better. To say that microsoft won't advance it's development is probably hearsay, because if enough people reach out to the developers and provide actual feedback, it could be made to expand to comercial level. Microsoft isn't all bad as some people tend to conclude. Is narater a service at this point? Yes. Would i use it as my primary screen reader? No, however, if it does get a few more features like faster voices, it could be a fantastic built in alternative.