Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Great Article on Technology Accessibility
Cool geek stuff. I think I am particularly impressed at his efforts to make mobile technology user friendly for blind people. Since my cousin is deaf, I’m fascinated that his sister uses her T-Mobile Sidekick to use TDY services to talk to her brother by basically typing her whole conversation. It beats the old way of doing things by using a special operator who typed all your conversations for you.
Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.
Mr. Raman’s innovations have already made their way onto millions of PCs. At Adobe in the 1990s, he helped to adapt the PDF format so it could be read by screen readers. That was required for PDF to be used by the federal government, and it eventually led to the technology’s being embraced as a global standard for electronic documents.
“It was incredibly important to us as a business, and to the blind,” said John Warnock, the chairman and founder of Adobe.
I know this isn’t really about frugality, but for families who need tools and services like this, it’s good to know that some folks are out there pushing major technology to move accessibility forward as a cost of doing business versus making it custom for blind folks and charging extra for the feature.


