Every crowd has a silver lining
So many of us use YouTube virtually every day. We listen to our favourite tracks, catch up on sports highlights, and chuckle at celebrity blunders. Now imagine you couldn’t do that. And imagine you knew that most other people could. This is the situation facing some people with disabilities.
Luckily, there are people intent on changing this and opening virtual doors; on opening things up to the wisdom of the disabled crowd. Christian Heilmann, Lead Interaction Architect at Yahoo!, recently developed a modified version of YouTube called Easy YouTube. This is far more accessible and works with voice recognition and screen reading software for people with visual impairments, for example. The AbilityNet video below highlights how significant these changes can be for people.
As well as developing Easy YouTube, Heilmann has also been busy setting up Scripting Enabled. This was a two day conference in London in September ‘aimed at making the web a more accessible place’. The conference has started a movement which has already led to a similar event hosted by Adobe in Seattle in November and another hopefully in March 2009. There are positive things on the horizon.
I recently met Christian Heilmann at the Yahoo! Offices in London and asked him about these initiatives.
Heilmann stresses the need for people with disabilities or those that work with them to be more centrally involved in the development of techonological solutions. “It’s time that we make these two worlds of bleeding edge technology and accessibility talk to each other” he says.
This hope is not pie in the sky optimism either. Indeed, one of Heilmann’s colleagues at Yahoo! is well placed to carry out this dialogue.
Part 7: Blind Faith