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.
Researchers at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Public Policy and Research Institute just released results from the second Barriers to Digital Inclusion study, which show how often commercial websites and apps continue to exclude blind and low-vision customers.
We at AFB are thrilled that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) published its final rule on website and mobile application accessibility this week. This rule is the culmination of decades of advocacy and rulemaking and marks a significant step in ensuring that the digital environment is fully accessible to people who are blind, have low vision, or are deafblind.
Editor's Note: Each year, AccessWorld writers who attend the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference detail the most cutting edge or noteworthy pieces of technology they encounter. This year, Judy Dixon brings us details on new developments in mobility technology, AI Vision, and braille displays.
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.
As time passes, technology becomes more commonplace and increasingly crucial for most aspects of life, be it work, school, or leisure. As we integrate and evolve with digital spaces, equal access to technology and digital resources is essential for people with disabilities to ensure they can fully participate and engage with the world. That is our mission– to create a world of endless possibilities for people who are blind or have low vision.
Low vision awareness is about recognizing the diversity of vision we might find in our community or workplace. Blindness and low vision are not visual conditions that are either on or off. Low vision affects people in different ways, so it might be that someone with low vision has less peripheral vision, like looking down a cardboard tube, which can be caused by glaucoma, or it might be a very soft focus in the center of the visual field that can't be corrected.
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 previously possible by people.
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.
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.