We could all need assistive technology at any time – something Rachael Glazier knows only too well. She was fixing her son’s drone at Christmas when it took off unexpectedly. She jumped on a table to grab it, the table tipped, and she fell head-first on to a solid oak floor.
Her injury has been classed as “minor”, but it’s had big repercussions. “My speech was affected initially – I talked slowly and struggled to find the right words – plus I felt confused, had difficulty processing information, had headaches, was really tired, and wasn’t able to cope with social situations, as it felt like an information overload. Noise has also been a problem and still is, especially loud and sudden noises, although when I’m feeling particularly bad even the noise created when emptying the dishwasher can be painful.”
As a freelancer, Glazier needed to carry on working, and has found assistive technology to be, as she puts it, a “job-saver”. She can’t use the phone on her right ear, so uses the speakerphone option. Increasing the text size on her e-reader and laptop to extra-large has meant that she can read without getting headaches. Her smartphone is now on “night mode” and she has used the “reduce white point” function to reduce colour. She uses a blue-light filter to reduce glare and brightness on her laptop, too.
“All these things have made it possible for me to carry on working,” she says. “I’m not sure what I’d have done without them. I was signed off for a bit, but as I’m self-employed I’ve had to find a way to work as much as possible while still letting my head recover. I wish I’d made these changes earlier, but it took me ages to find the accessibility settings on my phone!”
This is a problem technology giant Microsoft is more than aware of. Having life-enhancing accessibility features at the user’s fingertips via Windows 10 – such as colour filters for vision issues and the mono audio for hearing impairments similar to Glazier’s – is great, but only if people know they exist. The tech company’s global aim to empower every person is central to its ambition to increase awareness of accessibility tech readily available to everyone.
Glazier is just one of the millions of people who have a “situational” need for assistive technology – a condition that is temporary as opposed to a permanent disability – but have had to go looking for tech solutions. It’s estimated that around 13.9 million people in the UK have a disability. But the older you get, the more likely you are to have one – 45% of pension-age adults have a disability.
“Within the general population, people are living longer and therefore living longer with disabilities, which typically arise as a result of the ageing process,” explains Robin Spinks, innovation through partnerships manager at the Royal National Institute of Blind People. “So, many people who consider themselves to be able-bodied today will in fact experience some form of disability at a later stage in their life. It’s assistive technology that can help people with disabilities such as sight loss to continue to live independently.”
And the future for these technologies is bright, says John Lamb, executive director of the British Assistive Technology Association. “Artificial intelligence, for example, allows systems to adapt themselves to the individual in a way that wasn’t possible before,” he says. “At its best, this technology enables people to take part in society in a way that they couldn’t before. And that opens up tremendous opportunities.”
Microsoft is constantly innovating and updating not just services to help access its own products, but also to the wider world. “Technology is reaching further into society than ever before, and therefore it has to reach a more diverse audience,” says Hector Minto, senior technology evangelist in accessibility at Microsoft. “We are working hard to make sure people with disabilities are leading a lot of this innovation at Microsoft. Through a series of what we call ability hacks, we have people with disabilities leading some amazing innovations.
“For example, the ReadAloud function in our Edge browser reads web content aloud to you. We now have 16 million monthly active users of that feature. That innovation came from a project around dyslexia.”
Accessibility has been an issue on the web from the very beginning: Minto says that, still, only around 5% of all websites are truly accessible. It’s not as easy as forcing people to be compliant, he points out: enforcement of web accessibility regulations is different across the globe. “That doesn’t mean the responsibility is taken away: we should all be responsible content creators. But we need to raise awareness of the tools they can use.”
Microsoft Office, for example, has a built-in accessibility checker for documents. The checker used to be hidden away in the File menu, but now it’s right next to the spell checker. That has increased the number of people using it 20-fold, says Minto. “It used to be that only compliance professionals looked at it. Now, everyone sees it on their toolbar.”
The future, Minto believes, is all about this awareness, particularly when it comes to those who develop a disability, or are temporarily disabled. “People don’t know about these functions at the moment,” he points out. “We want to see someone being sent home from A&E with a broken arm with the information that they can use the Sticky Keys function to type one-handed, or the Dictate function, or the Word Prediction function. We’ve got to move to a world where this is not specialist information. It should be routine.”
AI will be crucial in this world, where, he says, these functions will be “on by default: you won’t have to learn how to make things work for you. They will just work. For example, if you are typing one-handed your computer can sense that. Or if you are constantly pinching and zooming on your web content, your browser should recognise that, and the AI can ask if you want magnification or high contrast. It should be about how this unique human is working with their computer.”
And this inclusive design should always come back to people, he says. “Other people are a barrier to employment for people with disabilities. This might sound ridiculous, but 90% of the people I meet have no concept of how a person who is blind reads an email. We need to move to a world where everyone knows that people who are blind can read emails, where employers don’t think adjustment for disabilities is a hassle, and where tech is routinely accessible. We can’t keep saying to people that the tech in their workplace won’t work for them. We need everyone to invest in this space.”
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