techshare 2009 - accessibility and disability - a history of innovation, artur ortega, yahoo!

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Accessibility and DisabilityA History of Innovation

September 2009

Techshare

Speaker

Artur Ortega

Accessibility Evangelist

Yahoo!

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Who is Artur Ortega?

Blind Software Engineer

Innovation

A new way of doing something.

Innovation

A new way of doing something

radical and revolutionary.

Changes in

- thinking - products

Accessibility

The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is - a stone in a field.

Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single

moment.

Source: Jose Ortega y Gasset 1883-1955

Innovation in the Office

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The Office of Today

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Keyboard

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Keyboard

- Pellegrino Turri di Castelnuovo,

Countess Carolina Vantoni

- Precursor to the typewriter

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Keyboard

- 1960

- Picture based keyboards

- Today: McDonald’s

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Printer

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Printer

- Pellegrino Turri di

Castelnuovo

- Printer

- Ink: Tracing paper coated

with coal dust

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Scanner

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Scanner & OCR

- 1975

- Ray Kurzweil

- Reading Machine

- Flatbed scanner and OCR

technology

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Telephone

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Telephone

- Alexander Graham Bell

- Hearing devices

- U.S. patent on

telephone

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Telephone

- 1990

- ADA

- Accessible phones

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Telephone

- 1998

- Loopset

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Radio

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Radio

- Transistor

- Graham Bell and Laboratory

- Hearing Aids

- Sony: Transistor radio

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Radio

- Spectrogram

- Graham Bell Laboratory

- Making speech visible

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CPU

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Binary Code

- 1821

- Louis Braille six dot code

- Binary code, character set

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Microphone

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Microphone

- 1917

- E.C. Wente of Bell

Laboratories

- Condenser microphone

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Speech Recognition

- 1952

- Davis, Biddulph and Balashek of

Bell Laboratories

- Ten digits: 97 percent accuracy

- Today: Dragon NaturallySpeaking

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Headphones

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Talking books

- 1932

- American Foundation for

the blind

- Durable long playing

record

- Today: Audio books

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Voice Indexing

A Guide for Handicapped Visitors”

-Today: Apple iPod shuffle

-1980

-Talking book “Access to National Parks:

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Speech synthesiser

- 1936

- H.W. Dudley of Bell Laboratories

- Artificial talking machine

- “Voice coder“: "Voder“

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Applications

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Subtitling

-1960

-Pilgrim Imaging

-Captioned Films for the Deaf Program

-Today: BBC subtitles 100%

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Teletype machine

- 1964

- Marsters and Weitchrecht

- Teletype machine attached to

the telephone system

- Today: Internet chat and Instant Messaging

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Email

"I have spent, as you can imagine, a fair

chunk of my time trying to persuade people with hearing impairments to make use of electronic mail because I found it so powerful myself.“

-1972

-Vint Cerf

-protocols for the ARPANET

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The Office of the Future

Accessibility and Disability

The Future of Innovation

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“The origins of such technological staples as public address systems, text messaging and even the

Internet itself can be traced to innovative accommodations to people with disabilities. This

phenomenon is the basis for a growing awareness among engineers, architects and product

developers of the significance of universal design in our physical and electronic environments.”

- Deborah Kendrick, Cincinnati Inquirer

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Artur Ortega

Accessibility EvangelistYahoo! Europe Ltd

125 Shaftesbury AvenueLondon WC2H 8AD

United Kingdomortega@yahoo-inc.com