Black Friday is a day that gained popularity in America some years ago, but it is starting to become far more recognised in the UK as well. It’s a day where, essentially, everything is cheaper and prices are slashed. Yay! Aside from it being Black Friday, I decided that I would look into how shopping is more difficult for people with disabilities and how we can get help to be as independent as possible.
My experience of University is that anywhere that you want to study in is going to be busy and the library is one of the most difficult places to navigate and use at the best of times. There are always streams of students printing off essays, discussing group work, and eating the odd snack whilst finishing off their out-of-lectures reading! But what about when you’ve got a disability? Although every University library is different, I decided to write a little bit about mine and provide some access improvements of my own!
Speech recognition was initially designed for people who felt they needed to do lots of typing but couldn’t touch-type, otherwise known as the one-finger typing brigade or ‘hen-peckers’. However, it soon became apparent that there were disabled people out there, who couldn’t type by hand or struggled with literacy, who were suddenly thrown a computer life-line.
Like myself, many of you probably use streaming websites and services over the Internet to listen to music, read or listen to books, and to watch TV. With this is mind, I thought I’d test some of the biggest websites to see whether they worked with the VoiceOver application on a Mac computer, and rate how accessible they are in terms of graphic design as well.
This week, I’ll be discussing how speech recognition can be used to control computer technology. This is nothing new, however, it is often misunderstood and as it’s being rolled out to different computer platforms with differing success and considerations, we thought we’d better take a fresh look.