Welcome to the first AccessWorld issue of the year, Winter 2024! As has been true in the past, we once again celebrate Low Vision Awareness Month. At the beginning of the month, we published our 5th episode of the AccessWorld podcast, where our special guest, former AccessWorld Editor, Lee Huffman, discussed accessibility for people with low vision on the web. You can find the podcast on our site at the previous link, or on your podcast app of choice.
To close out the month, we will be posting a blog post from AccessWorld author Steve Kelley, detailing the various tools you can use as someone with low vision to accomplish various tasks from work to leisure. You can find our blog at afb.org/blog. We frequently post AccessWorld related content between AccessWorld issues on the blog.
We begin this issue with an article I wrote detailing some tips and suggestions for writing image descriptions and audio description for video content. There are many helpful resources discussing best practices for this type of content creation, and I share several in this piece.
Breean Cox, who has been featured in AccessWorld previously and recently graduated from our Talent Lab program, describes the actions that can be taken to make the web more accessible for people with low vision. We think this is an important topic to discuss separate from general accessibility for people who use screen readers due to the differing requirements for full accessibility.
Debra Erickson, who lost her vision later in life, is the owner of the Blind Kitchen, an online store offering cooking tools. Erickson completed culinary school after losing her vision so her site also includes information to aid people who are blind or low vision in using the tools they purchase from her store. In this article, Janet Ingber interviews Erickson about her personal vision loss and employment journey while also providing details on The Blind Kitchen site.
Graduated AFB Talent Lab apprentice Daniel Hawkins has written an article on making video games accessible for people who are deaf blind. He details the various possible permutations of combined vision and hearing loss and provides suggestions how games could be adapted for each.
I want to give a major shout out to the authors who contributed to this issue for their hard work and thank you for being an AccessWorld reader. I hope you find the information in this issue helpful and a benefit to you in your endeavors. As always, if you have any questions or comments, you can reach me by email, apreece@afb.org
Sincerely,
Aaron Preece
AccessWorld Editor and Chief
