When reading the banned librarian’s Key Takeaways for Libraries from FCC National Broadband Plan, I noticed that there was an allotment for adaptive technologies.
“The FCC found that, ‘An important and cross-cutting issue is accessibility for people with disabilities. Some 39% of all non-adopters have a disability, much higher than the 24% of overall survey respondents who have a disability.’ Major barriers include the lack of accessible websites, software, equipment and the connection speed needed to use crucial adaptive tools like VoIP. As any librarian will tell you, many people with disabilities only have access to basic adaptive equipment at their libraries. The plan concludes, ‘The federal government must promote innovative and affordable solutions to ensure that people with disabilities have equal access to communications services and that they do not bear disproportionate costs to obtain that access.’”
Following that thought, here are some adaptive technologies in the news:
- Hydraulics Could Enable Fullscreen Braille Display
- Digital Talking-Book Internet Service from NLS Delivers One Millionth Download
- YouTube has begun to add sub-titles to videos. YouTube Launches Auto-Captioning for Videos
- This video shows LookTel, an app for the blind, that “learns” to recognize new items by storing an image of the item, captured by the Smartphone, and matching it with a tag. The tag can be your own voice or a text tag that is read by the text-to-speech engine.
Cool fact:
Ok, it really doesn’t have to do with libraries, but tattoos for the blind?
