From MSNBC,  Reuters, EETimes, and Agence France-Presse:

Musician Stevie Wonder and advocates for people with visual impairments came to the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, encouraging companies to make products that can be used in a “vision-free” manner.

Advocates say popular touch screen devices pose particular challenges for people who are blind, and say work is needed to make those devices more accessible. “Can I ski 60 miles an hour downhill? Yes. Use a flat panel microwave? No,” joked Sendero Group CEO Mike May, who is blind. Sendero makes GPS navigational devices that have an audio output.

Wonder praised accessible products like the iPod music player and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, and said his wish list includes a car he could drive and a Sirius XM satellite radio he could operate. “If you can take those few steps further, you can give us the excitement, the pleasure and the freedom of being a part of it,” he said.

Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation for the Blind, said “We don’t want to hold up technological progress … What we’re saying is, think about the interface and set it up in such a way that it’s simple … The simpler you make the user interface of a product, it’s going to reach more people, sighted or blind.”

The Jernigan Institute, a branch of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and a sponsor of CES, has developed a list of five design guidelines to make products more useful including. Among their suggestions: use different sounds for menus, and provide controls with good tactile feedback. Mike Starling, chief technology officer of National Public Radio said, “I think in general there may be a view that accessibility may be becoming the new green.”

(Reuters photo)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under blindness/visual impairments, design, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.