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Accessibility Technology

Google Accessibility Update – Live Blog Post 9 – Fireside Chat Q & A

GETTING RIGHT INTO Q&A HERE
  • Will docs provide icons for people with cognitive disabilities?  It is being prioritized “in context” with all the other basic needs of blind and low-vision folks.
  • What is level of accessibility on Android of calendars when scheduling events?  Currently, best option is to use the agenda view.  All basic features work with TalkBack.  Gestures also work…nothing needs to be done any differently to make things work here.
  • TalkBack settings can be set to “audio duck” to give audio focus to events (say, new message notification) when listening to music, television, etc.
  • Are there plans to release tools to help developers automate analysis / do accessibility testing?  We’re looking at doing this in the future, (possibly) through tools that would cause builds to fail.
  • When will all “default” Android apps will be talkback accessible?  CASEY BURKHARDT answered this – we evangelize heavily inside Google, we know Gallery  in particular is a problem.  Most of the apps are good out-of-the-box.
  • How do you work with people who are recently vision-impaired or have limited computer abilities?  We’re not requiring people to have previous knowledge of interacting with machines, but are instead making interfaces that are intuitive for humans.  For example, iOS simplicity being used by children (like my 5 year old).
  • Will Android support other physical devices such as wireless (bluetooth, NFC, security dongles, etc.) devices?  If there are accessibility APIs, then we can bind to them.  Our goal is to enable all of these things, but we probably won’t scale it up on our own…tell us what you need and we can extend the platform to make it happen.  For example, there is NATIVE OTG support for many Android devices.
  • There was a vague question about date / time support in HTML5 (sorry, I didn’t catch the entire question):  support of HTML5 date / time controls are in latest OS version.
  • Can you talk about CourseBuilder?  TV RAMAN:  our team works in research, but we are working with that team, especially the component that allows users to create their own content.  (Paul’s 2 cents:  you can build a content management system, but people can abuse it and put completely inaccessible content into it…can’t really help that.).

TV RAMAN closed the event, thanking everyone for attending.

By Paul Schantz

CSUN Director of Web & Technology Services, Student Affairs. husband, father, gamer, part time aviator, fitness enthusiast, Apple fan, and iguana wrangler.

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