Friday, August 05, 2011

Google's effort to make the web accessible to disabled.

Recently, Google Korea introduced efforts to make the Web accessible to everyone, including disabled.

As we have seen in the class, there are still many people out there who is refrained from using internet due to their disability or age, like seniors or users who are blind and those who have hearing impairments.

Basic technology exists but making it available to everyone requires very interesting work. Google say that making the Web accessible is actually beneficial to a much larger percentage of users (not only to those with disabilities) For example, conversion from audio to text and vice versa online, as well as text captions for online media such as videos on YouTube.

Google has recognized the importance of mobile accessibility technologies by developing products such as the text-to-speech converter TalkBack, which tells the user what is happening on his or her mobile phone, and other functions like Voice Search and Voice Actions that enable them to search the Web and contact information as well as run mobile applications.

This is the pattern with all work Google does on accessibility. Google need to take that information and convert it to a different format like audio to text, English to Korean and text to audio. In general, it’s about taking one form to another.

Unlike other companies, instead of focusing on having more shares in the existing pies, Google is making the pie even bigger. They are the true frontier, indeed.

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