There are over 56 million people with disabilities in the United States, and many of these people have a lot of difficulty interacting with the world. This lack of accessibility is one of the issues that holds people with disabilities back from living their lives the way they want. Well, your Tulsa disability attorneys have been exploring the issue of accessibility, and we’ve found technology that is expanding accessibility for people all over the world.
Technology: Making the World More Accessible
- You Don’t Need to See to Believe—When most people pull up Facebook, they see a listing of pictures from their friends and family. Sometimes these pictures are clever jokes, sometimes they are heartwarming scenes, but they always mean something special to the people who post them. However, people with visual impairments aren’t able to enjoy these pictures like everyone else. So, Facebook set out to bring the experience of pictures to people who can’t see them. Using artificial intelligence technology and image recognition, Facebook can now describe the images posted to it. This will allow people with visual impairments to interact on Facebook in ways they couldn’t before.
- Building a Smarter Smartphone—Giora Livne is an admirer of technology, but after suffering a spinal cord injury, he became a quadriplegic. Years after Livne’s accident, Steve Jobs released the revolutionary iPhone, but the former electrical engineer felt left out. He couldn’t operate a phone that required you to touch it, so he decided to do something about it. He teamed up with developer Oded Ben Dov and they created Sesame Enable. Their company creates apps and hardware that allows people to use smartphones without having to touch them. The software uses voice recognition and the front-facing cameras on smartphone to make the phone work without being touched. The camera reads the user’s head motions to move a cursor, which enables people with disabilities to take advantage of some of the most powerful technology available for everyday use.
Want to learn more about accessibility and adaptation? Keep following our blog where you’ll get to see more about making this world more accessible for everyone.