Great cyber leg-up

With each breath we take and every second that counts, technology, in some corner of the world, is progressing unawares. It has been growing by leaps and bounds to bridge the gulf between what is impossible and human beings. Physical disabilities in this IT era can’t be considered a handicap to perform things as communication technologies and social media becoming disabled-friendly with every new discovery hitting the market.

The latest comes from the house of Google, a beta version of Voice Access, an app that enables speech recognition to control Android devices. At a glance we are likely to presume the intended user community to be the visually-challenged, but the scope lies beyond. Target is the mobility impaired or those finding it tough to operate touch screen — the paralytic, bed-bound and temporarily injured.

It looks like Google is following in the footsteps of Twitter, which, towards the fag end of March, came up with a similar add-on to its features to make picture caption aka alternative text for image posts. Once enabled, the thumbnail of the image comes accompanied with an ‘add description’ button to feed in the textual content to the picture. It of course brings cheer to the 300 million odd customers and the visually-challenged members along with the publisher, developer community. Those using screen-readers on the iOS and Android platforms can get it voice-read.

In the middle lies something more from Facebook. After Twitter and Google, the ‘baap of social networking’ arrived with an addendum — automatic alternative text. Here, the software helps the user get a spoken description of what is seen on the feed — meaning images. Till then the automated voice brought to the user just the name of the person, the posted text and the word ‘photo’ when there was an image in the place.

Microsoft’s Cognitive Services hit the headlines for the launch of the ‘Seeing AI App’, a brainchild of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In a YouTube video, Saquib, the core Microsoft developer, who lost vision at age seven gets talking about the days after losing vision and the advantages of the new app that has been developed by the team.

For Autism Acceptance Month, Apple introduced the young boy Dillan, his mother, and therapist/communication partner. The narration of the latter two in a YouTube video emphasising the efforts to bring Dillan lead a normal routine, also bring to the fore the role iPad can play in the development of autistic kids.