Revision as of 19:47, 19 April 2017

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Accessibility

The NBCC Mobile First Technology initiative (MFTi) is interested in accessibility from two perspectives:

• Improving the accessibility of mobile information and communication technologies (ICT) through the use of universal design principles and the development of new technologies, and
• Leveraging mobile software and hardware technologies to develop novel, assistive and adaptive solutions for people who have physical, language, or cognitive impairments.

MFTi has developed a patent-pending audio adapter that improves the accessibility of certain types of mobile apps during telephone calls. MFTi also performs an ongoing review of accessibility issues in mobile ICT in its annual reports.

Mobile ICT should be designed from the start with attention to accessibility as a matter of principle. There are also legal requirements to provide accessible designs in some jurisdictions. Practitioners of universal design have long recognized that technologies of accommodation inevitably have broader impacts than the accommodations they are meant to enable. The Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison identifies four categories of impairments: visual, hearing, physical, and cognitive or language.

Mobile ICT continues to enable novel new accessibility solutions, including sign language translation and voice-based interpretation of the world for the visually impaired.

Publications

• MOBILE FIRST ANNUAL REPORT 2015-2016
• MOBILE FIRST ANNUAL REPORT 2014-2015
• MOBILE FIRST ANNUAL REPORT 2013-2014

Projects

• Audio Adaptor & Method

Research topics

assistive technologies, universal design principles, user interaction methods

Technologies

Aipoly, Android, assistiveware, iOS, text-to-speech, tvOS