Microsoft bloggers Gary Moulton (left) and Daniel Hubbell (center) visit the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab as part of their "Road to CSUN" series on the Microsoft Accessibility blog.
Microsoft’s Daniel Hubbell and Gary Moulton have been road-tripping to the 27th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference being held this week at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), but don’t panic if all the hype leading up to Sunday’s Academy Awards and NBA All-Star Game has kept you from checking in on their progress, as all the stops on their voyage are being archived on Microsoft Accessibility blog.
The trip-report concept is perfect for the blog medium. Here are two people in a car, with a camera, traveling from Seattle to San Diego for a professional conference that, as CSUN’s Center on Disabilities’ managing director Sandy Plotin says in the press release, is “committed to driving innovation in assistive technology to promote inclusiveness for people with disabilities.” And all along the way, they stop at various locations to meet with companies designing the technology and visit communities where it’s being used.
One episode of note was day four, when the duo crossed into northern California and stopped in Eureka, a town of just under 28,000 people located on the Pacific inlet of Arcata Bay. The purpose of the stop was to highlight Microsoft’s licensing options for refurbished computers, which has enabled the organization they visited to provide accessible computers to more than 500 people.
Neither of the spokespeople Dan and Gary have met with were identified by name in the video, unfortunately, but they both spoke eloquently about the challenges of making people in rural communities aware of the availability of assistive technology and the difference it can make in their lives:
Episode six is another highlight, with visits to the Santa Clara County Office of Education and the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, where Chief of Accessibility Alan Brightman talked about how the company trains its developers to consider people with disabilities at the onset of a project, putting it in terms of dollars and cents:
If you build a site with accessibility built in from the beginning, the accessibility part costs you about 2 percent of the overall construction. If you build a site, forgot about accessibility, and try to bolt it on after the fact that will cost you 100 percent of what it cost you to build the site.
When Dan and Gary reach the CSUN conference, hopefully they will offer a recap of some of the exhibits and presentations, including one by Kathleen Martinez, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy. She is the conference’s featured speaker, and on Thursday she’ll be talking about what her agency is doing to advance employment and training opportunities for people with disabilities (which we’ve touched on in previous posts), and how technology can aid those efforts.
Comments?
Image by y.accesslab (Yahoo! Accessibility Lab), used under its Creative Commons license.
there can be to great a learning curve to proivde the quick success some parents are after. Do you have any thoughts on this or can recommend a speech to text program that is very easy to use and that does not require much training and correction on the part of the user. I just have not yet found anything that fits the bill.Beth