What’s coming in the next decade in technology accessibility – Fast Company

As more and more of our lives are spent in the digital world, its important that that world is accessible to everyone. Technology has allowed for huge strides in disability accessibility, from improved voice-to-text functions to apps that connect someone with a virtual assistant, but experts say theres still a lot of work to be doneespecially when it comes to simply using the internet. Americans with disabilities are three times as likely as those without a disability to say they never go online, according to the Pew Research Center.

Advancements have been (and continue to be) made for those who are visually, hearing, or physically impaired, but Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of Maryland, says we havent yet tackled the most challenging area: differing cognitive abilities. As were about to enter a new decade, he hopes this is a gap technology can help fill.

For somebody who is blind, you can turn visual communication into something auditory, and for someone who is deaf, vice versa. But you cant take information and transform it from cognitive to some other dimension, Vanderheiden says. The biggest thing weve found in the last period of time is that many more people are having trouble accessing information than we had suspected.

This even includes people without cognitive disabilities, he addspeople who functioned in society just fine before technology infiltrated everything. Weve started adding complexity to things, he says. You used to walk over to the thermostat and turn it . . . now its a digital interface. Being technology savvy is a separate skill set from other kinds of intelligence, and this act of technifying everything can be alienating to parts of the population who suddenly find they need to be behind a computer to do their jobs, their work in school, or even complete their menial tasks like paying bills and buying food.

Vanderheiden is working on two solutions to this problemone which will be available soon and another longer term solution that requires getting a lot of people on board. Like lots of disability focused technologies before them, these solutions would also make things easier for those who dont have a disability, just less technology-abled or looking for a convenience.

The first is Morphic, an assistive technology spearheaded by the Trace R&D Center. Morphic is an operating system extension that would personalize a computer to an individuals needs, whether that means changing the font size, language, contrast, or making certain features easier to find. In pilot testing now and slated for an early 2020 release, Morphic would allow anyone to sit at a computerwhether in their home, a library, an office, or a school laband have its settings be tailored to their abilities, like putting on a pair of glasses with their prescription. When they log out, the settings will revert, so the next person doesnt have to manually change everything.

The longer-term solution would change the way our tech world approaches accessibility. Right now, each individual company has to make sure their systems are accessible. While some companies (like Apple and Microsoft) have been putting a lot of effort into making those changes, they still may not have the right resources or enough time to figure out the best accessibility solutions. Rather than having these companies try to create an interface thats usable by everyoneespecially as future technologies look more and more different from todaysVanderheiden proposes that developers create interfaces for mainstream users, and then a separate entity would build tools to interpret those interfaces for disabled communities.

This would be an extension of the assistive technology model, but these tools could work with any interface. An example Vanderheiden cites is the idea of a public Info-Bot that could understand a mainstream interface and then create user-specific versions for a variety of accessibilities. You might think companies would oppose this if they want to control their own designs, but Vanderheiden says its actually the opposite: The companies want to have control over the main interface design, and all the rules about accessibility put all these constraints on what they can do, he says.

One problem with putting the onus for accessibility solely on a company is that there will probably be some oversight, intentional or not. Autonomous cars could be breakthrough for the visually impaired, but if developers make clear speech a requirement in that interface, that limits the accessibility for another whole section of the population. Even ordering a pizza is restrictive: a blind man sued Dominos after he was unable to order food from the companys website or app, even though he had screen-reading software. Attorneys for the pizza chain tried to argue ADA requirements dont extend to online platforms, but when so much of our lives are conducted online, how is the digital world not a public space? The courts sided with the man, and accessibility advocates considered it a win, noting that if businesses dont maintain accessible websites, theyre essentially shutting people with disabilities out of the economy. Its a ruling that will reshape how companies make decisions about their websites and technology for years to come.

A separate tool that adapts technology for each individual could be the answer to making sure everyone has a fair chance of participation, and proves thatwhether companies like Dominos agree or nottheres a societal understanding that the internet is for everyone. If anything, the idea shows that our approach to accessibility needs to be rethought. Technology is ever changing, Vanderheiden says, and so how we approach it needs to also change.

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What's coming in the next decade in technology accessibility - Fast Company