While browsing the latest press releases, this release caught my attention. “Nuance introduces the Nuance Accessibility Suite; provides unprecedented User Accessibility to Mobile Devices.”
Now, I’m usually skeptical of hype, especially when it is provided in the form of a press release, but this seemed very interesting, especially when most of my search engine referral traffic to the accessibility blog is made up of people looking for mobile accessibility solutions.
The Problem with Mobile Devices
The main issue with cell phone usage is that the screen displays are very small, so text and images are unreadable. In addition the number pad and interfaces are so small they are rendered useless by a blind or low-vision user. Looking over the Nuance press release, there are multiple assistive technology products used in making these mobile devices accessible. The first, TALKS, is a text to speech converter, to help users hear the content on the device. TALKS also allows for Braille input and output for blind users. The ZOOMS technology allows low-vision users to view magnified content on the cell phone up to 16x. These can be purchased together or separate. In the spirit of true accessibility, this software is available in over 20 languages and can be installed on any phone running the Symbian Series 60 operating system.
Looking at the site, it looks as though there is also speech recognition software available as well for mobile devices, increasing the accessibility another level.
Why can’t we . . .?
It is so amazing to see these advances in the assistive technology realm. What’s even more amazing is that the technology developed to make mobile devices accessible, can also make sense in so many other application and to a much wider audience. Maybe this should cause a re-thinking of the philosophy of consumer technology development. Instead of creating a device or technology that only a few fully-capable people can use, (read: high school kids who can text each other at a rate of 100 wpm) why not create a device or technology that anyone can use; a child, and elderly person, someone with limited mobility, and the rest of us that find these interfaces too small or too complicated. In doing so, the device would be able to be used by anyone, not just a few. I would think that the sales of such usable technology would justify the expense.
Yeah, that’ll happen.
Mobile manufacturers need to do much more to make their devices accessible, and the networks need to train their staff to identify products that will be useful to people with different needs.
My wife is registered blind; she can see just not very well. When we were looking for a new phone for her last year the staff in the phone shops we visited were sympathetic, but ultimately not knowledgeable enough to help.
In the end I managed to find out that vodafone has a specialist unit to help people with disabilities. I spoke to them and they recommended a number of products, but they either had limited functionality or where text to speech programmes. My wife doesn’t want a phone that talks to her, she’s self conscious as it is, the last thing she would want is each letter of her txt being spelt out to her.
The problem is with the quality of screens getting better and better and the resolution getting higher the average text size on a mobile is probably about 8px. Astonishingly most of the phones we looked at had no way for a user to adjust the text size. In my opinion adjustable text size is probably the single most useful accessibility feature manufacturers could add.
In the end we found the motorola razr had a screen that my wife could cope with so she went for that.
Comment by Mark — January 19, 2007 @ 1:32 pm