Diverse Customer: Get Involved: Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) May 16th, 2019

Making Technology Work for Everyone

At Diverse Customer, we are equally committed to promoting digital inclusion. That's why we love integrating assistive technologies and innovations that are based on the tenets of universal inclusive design to help users with visual, auditory, motor or cognitive disabilities to seamlessly interact with digital devices and content. 

This May 16th is the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) to put a greater focus on digital accessibility and inclusion for the billion people across the world who have different abilities and impairments - Credit: Interaction Design Foundation

Needless to say that digital inclusion awareness is not just for developers or designers and goes far beyond user experience. Committing to Digital Accessibility is a sure shot way to ensure that no one is excluded. Diverse Customer is starting a new service for professionals with hearing and visual impairments and we will work towards designing web content that is accessible to a diverse audience. We have tied up with an external service provider to help us in developing digital solutions that meet the needs of a wide range of people who may have specific challenges. The service will include for instance Braille Instruction materials for professionals with Visual impairment as part of our Diversity Training, we are ensuring the handouts are not just the normal printouts / Visual Aid material for professionals with Hearing impairment Or making websites screen-reader compatible. Also, the blog's most-read diversity stories will now also be available on a podcast to allow for alternative methods of accessing our content and services. This offering will launch in early 2020. Please be on a lookout for links etc.

As part of Accessibility programs that we already run for some of our clients, we are also working towards building a repository of service providers and technologies, products and services designed to meet that help in the perception, navigation, and interaction with the web and digital products and services. 

So this is a great way for our readers to get involved. Please let us know of the accessibility tools that you are aware of. We would love to hear from you, mention you in our future posts on Accessibility and Digital Inclusion. 

Here are a few that we are rooting for: 

Text-to-Speech:

• JAW - Job Access with Speech
• NVDA - Non-Visual Desktop Access
• vOICe - An AI app that helps the visually impaired "see" the sound
• Seeing AI - An AI app that helps with facial, text and object recognition

Speech-to-Text: 

• Live Transcribe - Live Transcribe, a free Android service that makes real-world conversations more accessible by bringing the power of automatic captioning into everyday, conversational use. This is a free and new accessibility service built by Google to tackle hearing impairment (complete/partial) allowing real-time captioning of in-person conversations.