Digital Accessibility News

In a significant step towards enhancing accessibility and comprehension of complex charts and graphs, a team of researchers from MIT has created a groundbreaking dataset called VisText. The dataset aims to revolutionize automatic chart captioning systems by training machine-learning models to generate precise and semantically rich captions that accurately describe data trends and intricate patterns....

Accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have in the modern workplace -- it’s a necessity for all employees. True accessibility at work involves cultural and technological components. Culturally, it’s about rethinking assumptions of what accessibility means, including whom it benefits. On the information technology side, accessibility becomes possible when employees have access to the tools that enable their full participation. The good news is that today’s assistive technologies...

The mess began when Reddit revealed would be demanding $20M a year for access to the API used by popular third-party app Apollo. The developer responded that the app would have to close as a result. A planned protest by what was initially a few dozen of the biggest subreddits eventually turned into more than 8,000 subreddits going dark for at least 48 hours. Others...

Google introduced new accessibility and learning features on Tuesday at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) expo. These features included expansion of the reading mode, pairing with a sign language interpreter in Google Meet and AI-powered question suggestions in a class. The company has been experimenting with AI-powered tools in its consumer products like Search, Gmail and Sheets. Now, Google is bringing AI-powered...

Wayfair LLC violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by operating a website that is inaccessible to blind and visually-impaired individuals, according to a class action lawsuit filed June 18 in New York federal court. Plaintiff Seana Cromitie is a visually-impaired and legally blind person who utilizes screen-reading software to read website content on her computer. She notes that a 2010 U.S. Census Bureau report...

In December 2022, a few months after learning that he’d won an Iowa Arts Fellowship to attend the MFA program at the University of Iowa, David James “DJ” Savarese sat for a televised interview with a local news station. But in order to answer the anchorman’s questions, Savarese, a 30-year-old poet with autism who uses alternative communication methods, needed to devise a communication hack. He’d...

Digital accessibility, in simple terms, means ensuring accessibility of digital products and services to People with Disabilities (PwDs). This could be a website through which one orders clothes or groceries, or a ticket-dispensing kiosk at a theatre. As per the Census of India 2011, there are 26.8 million PwDs in the country. This is substantial, and hence proactive measures are necessary to ensure accessibility for...

A report by Jefferson Frank has revealed that the digital skills gap is widening between disabled and non-disabled tech professionals that have started but not finished a certification. While there’s been an increase in reporting especially on gender disparities in tech, it’s also vital to expand the conversation around disability access and inclusion in tech, says recruitment agency Jefferson Frank. Accessibility in technology has become...

(TNS) — Congressman Mike Thompson, D-Yolo, introduced the Access Technology Affordability Act this week that, if passed, would provide a refundable $2,000 credit to blind and vision-impaired people to purchase equipment that allows them to work. "No one should be excluded from the workforce because of a disability," Thompson emphasized. "The Access Technology Affordability Act will provide those with vision loss the resources they need...

Our objectives were to review the Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) process for resolving web accessibility complaints that were previously dismissed and subsequently reopened as directed investigations and OCR’s approach to evaluating web accessibility complaints submitted after the November 2018 revision of its Case Processing Manual....

The 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act is in about six weeks. Many companies create positive social media and advertising campaigns trying to convey how much the ADA means to them. But these posts, tweets, and press releases can go wrong in many ways if the company's words on the holiday don't match their day-to-day actions. Here are ten situations all organizations should...

Only halfway through and the year's already been a whirlwind of both technological advancements and unwelcome changes, from the continued hype around artificial intelligence to the ups and downs of social media giants. Similarly, within the push for greater digital accessibility and improvements in assistive technology, 2023 has ushered in immense successes and unfortunate failures among the industry's leading forces and pioneers — a clash...