Brian Lawless is a photographer.
The industry did well this year.
C. Low is 12.31.21
The industry as a whole has neglected people with disabilities despite all the advances in technology. There have been improvements to video call apps, including better support for sign language interpreters and closed caption. This year, both TikTok andInstagram added stickers that allow automated caption for speech in videos. Major organizations continued to exclude people with disabilities. The organizers of E3 failed to impress the hard of hearing during their live streamed show.
There are too many individual transgressions and improvements here. Tech's largest companies have the greatest influence over what the rest of the industry does. We have a better chance of seeing change in the way tech thinks about inclusive design if we hold them accountable. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and more did to improve the accessibility of their products and services in 2021.
Apple has been at the forefront of inclusive design for a long time, and in the year 2021, the company launched new features that made it easier for people with disabilities to use its products. Apple launched several new products, including a new screen reader, to help the visually impaired. In May, it launched a service called SignTime, which allowed customers to communicate with customer service representatives via their browsers, and sign language interpreters on demand. The feature is available in the US, UK, and France.
This year, Apple introduced Assistive Touch for the Watch, which allows for touch-free interaction with its Wearable. The idea is that users can use their fists or fingers to navigate. It may not be feasible for people who don't have the strength or dexterity to clench their fists to do Assistive Touch. It is a start, and one that few other watches offer.
The first medically certified eye-controlled iPad was launched this year for people with very limited range of motion. It is a case for the iPad as large as the Pro model and comes with a wheelchair mount and large speakers. This will allow people with cerebral palsy to communicate with others more easily, and also interact with the tablet. A window on the other side of the case can show what the user is saying.
Improvements for hearing aid users with Apple's phones allow for bi-directional communication. The hearing aid can pick up the speaker's voice, too, meaning that those who connect compatible hearing aids to their iPhones no longer have to use their phone's mic to be heard by their callers. ReSound and Starkey have released compatible devices.
Apple made it possible for people with visual impairments to tell when the mouse moves or changes shape by filling it with their own outline and color. The company added keyboard shortcuts to allow users to use a keyboard instead of a mouse.
Apple added tools for developers to make their apps more accessible. There are fewer obstacles in the way when trying to make more inclusive products with this simplified workflows.
Some features of the Apple's voice assistant, called "Siri," were removed when the company released its latest operating system, called "iOS 15." He is the director of advocacy and governmental affairs for the American Council of the Blind. When the OS was updated, users couldn't access their calling history, voicemails, emails and messages through the app. He said that the company said it was working on restoring the function to the phone.
There are tools for people with disabilities in the portfolio of products and services. Project Relate is an app that will generate custom voice recognition models for people with severe speech impairments. The app can read out what the user said. Project Relate is currently in a testing phase, with people with atypical speech invited to sign up as a tester.
The company did a lot to improve its products. The Talkback screen reader was updated in February. In March, it was announced that the Chrome browser could be used to help people who are hard of hearing. It would be possible to get your caption without having to worry about connecting to the cloud.
In the year, the company added 10 languages to its auto-generated image descriptions tool, made it easier to interact with devices using facial expressions, and brought more natural-sounding voices to the "Select to speak" feature in Chromebooks.
In addition to improving its existing products, Google explored accessible experiences that could produce learnings for the industry at large. It collaborated with the RNIB and The Guardian on Auditorial, which it describes as an experiment in telling stories that adapt to suit the reader. It is a fully-customizable experience that will allow those with visual disabilities to enjoy it as much as any other reader.
Auditorial is intended to pose a question about how much more accessible the world's information could be, if you could simply tailor every website to suit your personal sensory needs and preferences. The hope is that this will lead to a discussion on how the web could become more inclusive. In order to help other publishers learn tips on how to open up online stories to millions of blind and low vision users, the "auditorial accessibility notebook" was published by Google.
SignTown is a browser-based game that uses your camera to teach you sign language and assess your progress. The game is part of a larger effort to push the boundaries of technology for sign language and deafness. The company said it is exploring building a more comprehensive dictionary across more sign and written languages, as well as collaborating with the search team on improving search quality for sign languages.
Microsoft.
Microsoft surprised us by releasing the most inclusively designed version of Windows. The new OS has dark and high contrast themes and sounds that are more soothing and can be heard by more users. The section called "Ease of Access" was renamed to "Accessibility" to make it easier to find. It is easier to dictate your messages when you use Windows Voice Typing.
Microsoft announced a five-year commitment to "help bridge the 'Disability Divide'". It focuses on hiring and educating people with disabilities. That includes using artificial intelligence in Word to detect and convert heading styles for blind and low-vision readers, a new navigation pane in excel for screen readers, and expanding Immersive Reader to better convey what's on PowerPoint slides and notes. It added a new accessibility checker that works in the background and will prompt users to fix issues across Microsoft Office apps and Outlook.
The company expanded live caption and transcription capabilities in Teams, as well as added support for CART, which allows for the caption of multiple presentations. There is auto-captioning available.
The company launched a new kit in September to make it easier to use. The bundle has tags, labels, keycaps and more to make PC parts and buttons more identifiable. Microsoft added sign language support to its stores to help the blind. Microsoft doesn't seem to offer this for after-sales support yet.
Microsoft is one of the few companies that is transparent about how it trains and hires people with disabilities. The Urban Airband initiative provided affordable broadband, hardware and software to people with disabilities in Los Angeles and New York. Microsoft said it is expanding to additional tertiary education institutions to increase graduation rates of students with disabilities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It is also working to create best-in-class UDL environments.
Microsoft is adding accessibility resources and features to LinkedIn, including a course on accessibility in the modern workplace, to connect people with disabilities to employers. Job seekers with disabilities were the focus of the events. Be My Eyes, an app that connects blind and low vision users with sighted volunteers, made LinkedIn staff available for visual assistance on video calls.
Microsoft launched an artificial intelligence for accessibility low-cost assistive technology fund to make it accessible to those who can't afford it. This is a good step towards getting people the gear they need. The Fund acknowledges the high price that people with disabilities continue to have to pay to be part of the world able-bodied people take for granted.
People with disabilities aren't the only ones who are targeted by Amazon's accessibility efforts. The company helps older people feel more confident living alone. It introduced two programs this year that allow administrators to offer voice-assisted experiences in places like senior living facilities and hospitals. The company launched a device that would connect caregivers and elderly people. It would give loved ones peace of mind with features like fall detection and remote assist.
Light and dark modes were added to the Amazon app. The new option gives people more time to finish speaking, which it said is designed to help people with certain speech impediments. The boxes for the second generation of the Echo Frames included braille text in the instructions for the website. Amazon launched a dictionary audio feature to help those with learning disabilities and foreign language speakers understand pronunciations.
The company introduced a new home robot called Astro that follows you around your home and provides easy access to helpful info via its display. It helps caregivers look out for loved ones remotely and keeps an eye on your home while you are away. The robot has been trained to work for customers who use wheelchairs, walkers or canes. It will play sounds to make it stop tripping.
Labrador Systems, which makes home robots to help people with limited mobility live more independently, is one of the accessibility-minded projects that Amazon invests in. The company has worked with a neural interface startup to add support for its brain-computer interface headsets. A new speech recognition app was released by Amazon and Voiceitt to help users with atypical speech converse with other people.
Amazon has received many updates to improve accessibility, but its Prime content seems to have been neglected. Many titles on Prime TV use text to speech with synthetic voices, even though Prime TV offers audio descriptions on a large amount of content. The overall quality of the content suffers, making it less enjoyable for blind and low vision consumers.
This is an example of something that is done for people with disabilities without input, feedback and collaboration with the disability community.
It is easy to overlook the company's accessibility-related updates. The company updated its Automatic Alt Text system at the start of the 21st century. This was a 10x increase since the debut of AAT. More detailed descriptions of objects in a picture and their relative sizes were added to Facebook on the iPad.
Facebook may have broken accessibility features as it pushed out these updates. The company turned off its facial recognition system this year, and that led to less-informative descriptions for users who are blind or have low vision. The change was done due to privacy concerns, and he believes it was made without considering accessibility and the disability community. They were not given the same consideration as privacy concerns.
In November, Facebook published a post about this issue. The company's vice president of artificial intelligence wrote that they need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns.
Pesenti acknowledges the importance of face recognition in AAT to help blind and low-vision users identify their friends in pictures. While some facial recognition tools, like identity verification, will remain, for the most part features like alerting users to photos potentially including them or automatically labeling their friends are going away. Both sighted and visually impaired users can use that.
Pesenti wrote that they know the approach they have chosen involves some difficult tradeoffs, and that they will work with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading the discussion.
The company added an accessibility tab to the settings menu to make it easier for people with disabilities to find features. Color Correction and Raise View were brought along to give a standing perspective for seated users. Meta said that it is still working on Raise View and will add it to the accessibility menu when it is ready.
ZP Better Together is a company that makes technology for the blind and hard of hearing. ZP will give free portals to people who are hard of hearing as of December.
The audio rooms on Facebook in the US were equipped with live caption from the start. It also has a visual cue to indicate who is speaking, and offers caption for other audio products.
The company has a new focus on the metaverse this year. Mike Shebanek, head of accessibility, said that they are already working to bring the metaverse to life and are excited to explore the breakthrough possibilities it presents to make the digital world even more accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities.
We will have to wait and see if that happens, but Meta must continue to engage with the accessibility community to make sure that its expansion is inclusive from the start.
There is a social media site called the Twitter.
After an embarrassing launch of Voice Tweets, which excluded its deafness and hard of hearing users, the company set up two accessibility teams. The company has shown improvement since then. Automatic video caption was added in 2021, along with added accessibility labels in Spaces. The company says that the last one is available in most languages and can be found on the internet.
A couple months ago we started uploading video caption files. All videos will be auto-captioned. To see them, you can either use the CC button on the Web or turn on the caption in your mobile device settings.
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What do you think about the experience?
December 14, 2021.
This may seem like a small set of updates compared to the rest of the companies, but in fact, there is a smaller portfolio of products. It has made significant changes. The first social media platform to prompt users to include alt text with images was Twitter, according to Rachfal.
Notable developments in technology this year.
The accessibility features of alt text and caption are difficult to use. They are labor intensive processes that companies tend to delegate to Artificial Intelligence, which can result in garbled, inaccurate results. The E3 gaming convention this year had closed caption that made the show hard to understand for those who relied on subtitles.
There are parts of the online world that are in dire need of accessibility improvements. A study done in February of this year by WebAIM shows that 97.4 percent of websites had mistakes that failed the web content accessibility guidelines. The most common errors were missing alt text, low contrast text, and form input labels.
Other media formats need to be more inclusively designed as well. The National Association of the Deaf filed a lawsuit against three major audio-visual providers this year.
More than 48 million Americans with hearing problems are denied full and equal enjoyment of the content they offer their hearing users because the three defendants do not make transcripts or caption available for any of the podcasts offered on their platforms. Amazon Music launched synchronized transcripts in November, and this year, it was announced that it will start offering automatically generated transcripts.
There are many industries that could use accessibility improvements. The healthcare area is problematic for people who are blind or have visual impairments. He said that the entire sector is heard about far too often by members. We are currently in the third wave of COVID-19 and it is not right to exclude people with disabilities when it comes to scheduling vaccinations or testing appointments.
The Justice Department reached a settlement with the drugstore chain to make it easier for people to get COVID-19 testing. Those who have a hard time using a mouse were not able to register for a vaccine through the portal. The calendar on the website didn't show screen reader users any available appointment times, while people using keyboard-based navigation could not use the tab key to complete a consent form required to schedule an appointment.
The ACB worked with a pharmacy to provide accessible prescription information. The Spoken RX feature would allow you to read out prescription labels.
There have been many transgressions in the past year, but we saw promising developments in ensuring technology is inclusive. The FCC proposed rules in December to make emergency alert more useful for people who are hard of hearing.
In March 2021, the company will launch 1,500 hours of audio- described content and will include the descriptions to all newly produced original content as well as adding more to its back catalog. Planet Fitness is working with the Coalition for Inclusive Fitness to buy and install accessible exercise equipment in its stores.
I have only scratched the surface of the updates. The increasing willingness of companies to work with disability rights groups and advocates at the earliest stages of product design is most encouraging. More and more companies are reaching out to the NAD in the beginning phases for input rather than late in the process, according to the director of engagement for the NAD. A growing commitment to accessible media and content is born out of the advocacy work of ACB and the Audio description Project through collaborative discussions with industry.
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