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Disability Pride Month: A Personal Reflection
When it comes to days or months designated to draw attention to specific issues or give voice to those traditionally unheard, the term "awareness" is often used. However, for Disability Pride Month, the word "pride" is used instead. This distinction is important and worth discussing. As someone with a disability who works in the field, I've thought a lot about Disability Pride Month over the last few weeks and its significance.
In my research, I've noticed that some people find the idea of…
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Accessibility
Elevate Your Accessibility Knowledge with Teach Access and AFB
Today marks the 34th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This year, we've partnered with Teach Access, an organization that aims to broaden accessibility knowledge among industry and academia, to detail multiple resources that can elevate your disability knowledge. We will be detailing resources available through Teach Access as well as those from the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)—free and comprehensive resources for educators, stakeholders, and developers…
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Americans with Disabilities Act, Accessibility
Balancing Accessibility and Cutting-Edge Technology: a Possible Approach to Software and OS Updates
Recently, in the blindness and low vision community, there has been discussion about Sonos, a popular manufacturer of smart speakers, releasing an update to their mobile app that significantly affected its accessibility for VoiceOver users on iOS. If you would like to learn more about this situation, or discover where things stand currently with Sonos accessibility, see this excellent blog post by Jonathan Mosen. Fortunately, it seems that Sonos is making an effort to improve VoiceOver…
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Accessibility
Reflecting Upon Our Successes on Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Today marks the 13th anniversary of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). In celebration of GAAD, I want to highlight the direct impacts on digital inclusion and accessibility that we at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) have achieved over the past year.
As an organization focused on improving accessibility, we produce a wealth of knowledge content. This includes our Talent Lab accessibility learning modules, our AccessWorld technology magazine and podcast, the peer-reviewed…
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Accessibility, Public Policy
Interconnected content with AccessWorld
As part of our refocusing of AccessWorld in the spring of 2023, we have expanded AccessWorld beyond the magazine format. If you are not familiar with the changes that have come to the AccessWorld publication itself, we have now expanded AccessWorld to focus more directly on digital inclusion. This means that we now include content of interest to web and software developers, employers, and other changemakers in the digital inclusion space.
With this change, we have also expanded into new spaces…
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Create Helpful Image Descriptions with the W3C's Alt Text Decision Tree
When making digital technology accessible for people using screen readers, the implementation may be of varying levels of complexity, but the task is, in most situations, relatively straightforward: "Is this element labeled and viewable to the screen reader or not?" When we discuss accessibility, we generally are referring to websites, but this holds true for the vast majority of other modern digital interfaces including apps, desktop software, even operating system UIs. Images tend to be a…
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Accessibility
GPT-4 Image Recognition: An Absolute Game Changer in Accessibility
Accessibility is always improving, but 2023 saw one of the most significant accessibility breakthroughs since the advent of the accessible smartphone. GPT4, produced by Open AI, is a Large Language Model (LLM) that can accept both text and images. In summary, you can converse with an LLM much like you would with a person, and it will respond in a manner closely approximating human interaction. Also, the most powerful LLMs such as Open AI's GPT and Google's Bard, perform various tasks only…
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Accessibility
Spotlighting Breakthroughs in Multi-line Braille Displays
One of the most exciting developments in refreshable
braille display technology is the creation of market-viable multi-line
braille displays. While single-line braille displays have been in
production for many decades, multi-line displays have only become
widely available in the past half-decade or so. Currently, several
multi-line displays are available or soon to be released.
In this piece, I want to highlight three such displays: the Orbit
Slate, the Canute 360, and the Monarch.
Orbit…
Blog Topics
Braille, Accessibility
Conjury, A Showcase on Game Accessibility Using the Unity Accessibility Plugin
Just after I published this piece on game accessibility in the fall issue of AccessWorld, a game was brought to my notice that used one of the access methods I discussed in that piece. The game is called Conjury, and uses the Unity Accessibility Plugin to provide access to the user interface (UI) for people who use screen readers. The game is a turn based card game, meaning that by making the UI accessible, the game itself is entirely playable. I was excited to bring information on this game to…
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Accessibility
Advice and Information in the AccessWorld Archives
Over the years, we have published a great deal of material related to employment in our AccessWorld magazine. Though much of the content we have published is time specific, there are still many articles with information and advice still of use today. Historically, we published a column in AccessWorld titled Employment Matters, now our Employment Journeys series, which detailed the life and work of people who are blind and or low vision and successfully employed. In addition to providing a…
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Employment, Accessibility