Google just upgraded its Accessible View experimental search version. The new one shows up in large print, with sound alerts, keyboard navigation, and screen reader compatibility.
Do-it-yourselfers know Instructables as a great online resource of well-documented, practical projects, and a wide, wise dialogue about them. A recent project took an IKEA crib and modified it for a small-stature parent, using the expert guidance of Judi Rogers of Berkeley’s Through the Looking Glass. Look at the multiplier effect on accessibility awareness when a mainstream site with giant traffic stats picks up our message. Join the Instructables Assistive Technology Group and share your savvy!
Fernando Botelho in MAKE magazine challenges us to build a $200 talking computer for blind kids: makezine.com: Let There Be Speech.
We all agree with the goal, but what’s the best way to achieve it? Is this really a technological problem, or is it an organizational and distributional one? Anyone who’s visited one of the assistive technology conferences knows that we’ve got the technological answers to almost all the accessibility problems we face. Where we fail — and we really are failing — is in getting those solutions into the hands of the people they were intended to benefit. Price can be a barrier, but so can lack of awareness or confidence, and poor implementation and support networks.
An alternative approach is not to build any new hardware, but to piggyback on existing hardware and technical support networks that are succeeding at the tough task of massive global adoption. This means “infiltrating” the wireless phone and One Laptop Per Child ecosystems. It means finding all the existing channels for communicating about accessibility solutions, and amplifying our message there. We may be able to do more good per dollar with an accessibility how-to poster in every Internet cafe in the developing world than a technology-driven development project.
Take a look at this college student’s experience of accessibility and accommodations:
Technology: A Love-Hate Story | Tania Says
So many of the problems arise from implementation rather than the “raw” accessibility in the products or environment:
Accessibility is a lab course!
No matter where you stand politically, this campaign ad video shows the real-life, everyday need for more and better accessible technology.