The Group That Makes Tech Work For the Disabled 44
jfruh writes "When the iPhone was first released in 2007, the blind community assessed it and determined it was essentially useless for them. Today it's the number one phone used by blind people, largely because of the efforts of the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). NCAM is part of WGBH, Boston's public television station, which broadcast the first captioned TV show in 1972. Since then NCAM has been a lifeline that makes sure that people with disabilities aren't left out of the technological revolution."
A little anecdote from some times ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Some two or three years ago I was using an XMPP/Jabber client for Android and helping with various small issues now and then, most of all translation.
One day there was a new bug report in the issue tracker, good explanation of the problem (text flow was not easily readable by screen reader), log files, and even a patch (quite some verbose Java code) to fix this while at the same time not really affecting the user interface.
Oh, did I forgot to mention that he was totally blind and using a screen reader on his Android to be able to also chat with other persons on XMPP/Jabber?
I was so amazed by the motivation, energy and overall quality of work from this determined person.
This may be a personal experience and can't be generalized - but still. Keep up the good work and remember to write your layout (may it be websites or whatever you put out there for a larger audience) in a way that the actual content can be easily separated from the presentation.