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Google Introduces Voice Access To Make Android More Accommodating For People With Disabilities (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched a new beta app called Voice Access, which lets people control their Android phone with voice commands. The company took the wraps off Voice Access as an accessibility tool to help people who have difficulties using the touch interface, such as those with tremors or paralysis. Once installed, items in Settings and apps on the Homepage are numbered. The user can tell the device, "Go Home", which is transcribed at the top of the page, and then say, "Open one", to launch the app numbered one. Twitter and Facebook also recently took some steps to make some of their services more accessible to people.
The disability thing is just a cover. They want to make sure our computers are less annoying to any time travelers from the future.
Agreed. It will be nice while driving.
"Computer, please open netflxix and play Star Trek IV"
It came as a great surprise to me when a friend who had become totally blind was using an iPhone. The smooth featureless surface seemed the last thing that would be useful to a blind person. But there is a whole subculture of apps for the blind for the iPhone, which, "surprise", were voice activated. He could use the phone to navigate the streets in his neighborhood when going for walks. He could order books for the blind over the phone, delivered to the phone, and listened to over the phone (using Bluetooth headphones). An amazing app is called "taptapsee", to identify objects. He just pointed the phone's camera at an object, double tapped the phone, and it spoke the name of the object!! Another app lets the blind person leave "notes" for himself. There are apps that will tell him what color an object is, using the camera of course. With one amazing app, he can point the phone at paper money, and it will tell him the denomination! I don't know if Android has all these capabilities, but why not? (A funny thing happened with my friend. His iPhone went completely blank, ie, the surface display refused to come up. This didn't bother him, but his wife couldn't see what was what. Turned out that it is a "feature" of an iPhone that if you triple-tap the surface, it will turn the surface display off! Took two trips to the Apple store to discover that one.) Bottom line, there are ten times as many apps for the blind for the iPhone than for the Android. (I counted 125 apps for the blind for the iPhone on one site, and could only find a dozen or so listed for the Android - a quick and non-scientific search :)). I seriously hope this will be the beginning of a surge so that Android can catch up. I am a very happy Android user, myself.
As a person with a disability acquired in adulthood, let me give you a little insight into my life. I lost my career as a programmer. I lost my ability to write. I lost my ability to communicate by email, instant messenger, IRC etc. I lost my ability to use Web services, commercial or governmental. I lost my ability to participate in the educational system. Yes I can read, I can turn the pages of a book but I can't fill in web forms, take online exams, or even write legibly enough for exams on paper. In other words, I lost my ability to participate in society. My perceived value is near zero even though my brain still works, I still have all the skills I had as a programmer/analyst, I just can't use my hands to express it. And according to your logic, there's no way a company could justify the expense of a personal assistant to transcribe what I say into something the company can use. They could just hire a person whose body works right. Many disabled people are quite competent cognitively, treating disabled folks this way is a pretty huge waste of human capital. Fortunately, with speech recognition I regained my ability to write and some programming but most GUI interfaces including web forms are still out of reach. For what it's worth, I acquired my disability as a result of programming. From what I've been able to determine, my disability hits about 30,000 to 40,000 developers a year. To be honest, the numbers are fuzzy because many red states have declared this kind of disability a nonreportable workplace injury and is not covered by Worker's Comp. Personally, I don't want you to build an accessibility interface. I want you to give me an API so I can write my own interface. The reason is simple. Given that most technologists royally fark up a GUI for ordinary people, there's no chance in heaven or earth that you will make an accessibility interface that's useful. An accessibility interface requires specialized knowledge because it is not just a replacement if your hands or your eyes, it's a whole different way of using an application and if you are not living the life of a crip, the chances of you understanding what the interface should be like is vanishingly small.