"Accessibility is a basic human right"

Eve Andersson. She's the lead on the Accessibility Engineering group at Google Research, an author, a keynote speaker, a visiting professor, a well-traveled photographer and she is fluent in four languages. A woman after my own heart! What a massive inspiration from another woman in not only the technology field, but in accessible technology - it is an incredibly small niche.

"Under Andersson's leadership, Google has made Android completely usable by voice, teamed up with outside vendors to give Android eye-tracking capabilities, and launched the Google Impact Challenge, a $20 million fund to generate ideas on how to make the world more accessible to the billion-odd individuals in the world living with disabilities." (FastCoDesign, 2016)

But what is important to mention is her work in non-language processing in terms of accessibility. The takeaway being "our ability to process and understand sounds that aren't speech inform a thousand little decisions throughout our day...There's no technical reason mahcine learning can't be turned on the task of understanding more than just speech. For example, YouTube can already auto-caption the speech in a video; mastering non-language processing could help it caption the sound effects, too." (more on her thoughts here)

Read her piece on building more accessible technology. I personally find high value in spreading the word about accessibility when the technology we are trying to share is user friendly for not just those working with disabilities - but those covering the vast range of tech savvy to not so tech savvy. There is no point of teaching innovation to an audience who cannot comprehend your curriculum. You know, that whole "Universal Design and Learning" thing? Stay tuned for a future post about UD and UDL.