Many features we take for granted today – on our phones, computers, televisions and other technology – were originally built for accessibility and special needs.
Today, 60 percent of people without disabilities use an accessibility feature.
For instance:
As we have all discovered, designing with constraints in mind… is simply good design.
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In the 1930s with the record player making its way into many homes, ‘talking books’ began to be recorded by the American Federation for the Blind.
Only 15 minutes of speech could be fitted onto each side of a record but began opening up the world of short stories and poems to blind people, followed by collections of records for works such as Shakespeare.
The earliest audiobooks, called talking books, were recorded in the 1930s.
By the time the compact disc came along in the 1980s, almost every classic or best-selling book was recorded as an audiobook.
Closed captioning was developed to make television accessible to those who were hard of hearing or had a hearing impairment.
It displays dialogue in text form, which can help people understand what’s happening if the audio is hard to hear.
The National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and ABC-TV began experimenting with closed captioning in the 1970s.
The NBS developed a time distribution system that hid a time code in the television signal, which a decoder in the TV set would display.
Today, however, it is commonly used – it is useful to read in a crowded airport, or to teach children how to read.
CC is also very popular to view social media videos without sound. Facebook estimates adding closed captions to video advertising increases views by 12 percent. It can also improve search rankings by giving search engines text content to crawl.
MCI Mail, one of the first commercial email systems and the first to connect email to the internet, was developed in the late 1980s by a team that included Dr Vint Cerf, who is hard of hearing.
Dr Cerf and his wife, who has a hearing impairment, used email to communicate instead of a telephone.
Today, each person receives on average 121 emails per day – 347.3 billion emails each day globally.
High-contrast screen settings were initially made to benefit people with visual impairments on televisions, mobile phones and computers.
High-contrast mode can simplify display settings, remove background images and display key lines in high contrast colours.
Today, many people benefit from high-contrast settings when they use a device in bright sunlight.
Predictive text was designed for users with motor skills limitations, to easily type their message.
Word prediction was originally designed in the 1980s as a writing aid to help people with physical disabilities to improve keyboard access, minimising the number of keystrokes required to type.
But it’s hard to remember now how different it was to use a mobile phone before predictive suggestions came along.
In the 1970s, James Marsters, an orthodontist who had lost his hearing during infancy, invented the teletypewriter (TTY) device to pass typewritten conversations through the telephone. It allowed many thousands of people with hearing impairments to communicate efficiently with hearing people.
As the TTY was slow, abbreviations were developed to save time e.g.
In the 1990s, text messaging (SMS) superceded TTY, itself created to help those who are hard of hearing – and today used by all mobile phone users.
Even the typewriter may have begun as a machine for the visually impaired.
It is thought the first prototype was developed by Pellegrino Turri, who created a machine for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano in 1808.
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