Accessible gaming for disabled children, e-reader for blind people, AbilityNet is looking for technology that’s inclusive by design

Leading digital inclusion charity AbilityNet is on the hunt for inspiring tech projects for this year’s Tech4Good Awards. That includes the Tech4Good Accessibility Award, which recognises people using tech to transform the lives of disabled people. Past winners include SpecialEffect and Lifelites, who are doing amazing things like making computer games accessible for disabled people and helping children in hospices keep in touch with family and friends. Entries close on 8 May – it’s free to enter and is open to any individual, business, charity, social enterprise or other public body with a base in the UK.

Lifelites provides tech equipment and support to children with life-limiting conditions in everyone of the UK’s children’s hospices and was the first ever winner of the Accessibility Award in 2011. Their CEO, Simone Enefer-Doy, says:

“Winning the Accessibility Award was a pivotal moment for us. I realised that we weren’t just a start-up; here we were, being told by our peers that there was something very worthwhile about what we did. It’s helped us to sell our cause to potential funders and has helped us continue to grow and help more children and their families.”

Last year’s winner was Bristol Braille Technology, who have created an affordable Braille e-reader for blind people called Canute, designed with and by the blind community. Ed Rogers, Bristol Braille says: “Winning the AbilityNet Tech4Good Award came after a long stretch of work to finish the latest Canute prototype. We certainly weren't expecting to win but we're very grateful for the recognition after so many years' work."

The AbilityNet Accessibility Award is one of eight categories open for entry as part of the 2018 Tech4Good Awards, organised by AbilityNet and sponsored by BT. Now in its 8^th year, the awards recognise organisations and individuals who create and use technology to improve the lives of others and make the world a better place. Other past winners include Open Bionics, WayFindr, Barclays Bank and LexAble – all of them demonstrating creative ways that tech can change people’s lives.

Mark Walker, Head of Marketing & Communications at AbilityNet says:

‘Technology has become part of everyone’s life but it can be a real game changer for disabled people. It’s always amazing to see the entries for this Award because there is so much innovation happening across the country, and we want to see how it is being used to make a positive impact in the lives of people with disabilities.’

Entries are judged by an expert panel of judges who have worked across the technology, digital and charity sectors and have the unenviable job of narrowing down 250+ entries to just 28 finalists.

So, if you or your team are working on something exciting that solves a problem for disabled people – be it the everyday mundane action, or the once in a lifetime experience - we want to hear about it. Let’s celebrate the brilliant work that the sector is doing in creating these life-changing and empowering technologies for good.

Deadline for entries is 6pm on 8 May 2018. For more information and to enter, go to: www.tech4goodawards.com/enter-now/

A new web standard called WebAuthn will soon remove the need to enter a password each time you log in to a website - and may even mean the end for CAPTCHAs - those evil and (quite literally) twisted codes that annoy everyone but often bar users with a disability.

The problem with passwords

Passwords are not a good approach to securing our online lives. Not only do we need to remember which username or email address we used on a certain website, but we also need to make sure we always devise a cunning password and then make sure we make a note of it.

Everyone experiences the challenge of remembering passwords that are complicated (or should be) and different from site to site. Yours aren’t different you say? Yikes – that’s another major aspect to the problem with passwords. Once someone has got yours for one website, they’re simultaneously into several others. Add to the mix a disability or impairment that makes the practicalities of remembering or retrieving passwords even more problematic, and it’s easy to see the benefits that a new approach might bring.

Another significant flaw in the whole password approach is that, with all that we betray of ourselves on social media and the internet, it’s almost child’s play for someone to masquerade as us when contacting a company to reset a supposedly forgotten password.

Finally putting passwords in the past

This new standard does away with the need for passwords by using some other device – it could be your smartphone, computer or a specialist handheld ‘widget’ – to enable you to confirm that you are who you say you are. We’re all familiar with receiving a code by text or an email with a link we need to click to complete a registration process.

Having to manually enter a code is inconvenient and may include mistakes, but clicking a link is relatively pain-free. This latter approach is in essence what is proposed by WebAuthn – but in a much more seamless way. Being a fully-fledged W3C standard means it won’t involve anything so clunky as email, it will be able to be built right in to the device you would use to provide that all-important authentication.

Got a smartphone? If so, when logging into a website on your computer using this new WebAuthn approach, a simple message will pop up asking you to confirm that you wish to log in and – voila! No need to go into your emails or open an app – the integration on a wide range of devices permanently authorised to approve your login will make it as simple as a click of a button, a tap of a screen or perhaps (for a little added security) the tracing of a special gesture.

Our passwords cannot be forgotten as they will no longer exist - and our online accounts will be as secure as those devices used to provide authentication.

Will WebAuthn kill CAPTCHAs?

And what about the dreaded CAPTCHA? I won’t go into the ins and outs of these critters here – go and read many of my other posts – but surely these scrambled codes that prevent so many disabled people (myself included) from being able to prove we’re human and not robots are just another point at which we are asked to prove that we are who we say we are.

Dear W3C, please say that WebAuthn will kill CAPTCHAs once and for all...

Take Robin's 2 minute CAPTCHA challenge!

Robin Christopherson is AbilityNet's head of digital inclusion. Find more of his blogs here. 

Robin is hosting a webinar on the business case for accessibility, this Wednesday (18 April). Find out more now. 

Find out how Skype is paving the way to more accessible cross platform apps.

Last week I published an article about Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) - apps that can be run across different devices with minimal changes – and the challenges they represent when it comes to being accessible and inclusive for all. Since that post went live Microsoft has announced its roadmap for addressing some of the pitfalls posed by PWAs in relation to its new Skype app. This is great news for disabled users worldwide.

The Progressive Web App problem

As we discussed in my previous post on PWAs, while Progressive Web Apps are a handy new approach to ‘build-once’ apps because they can be easily repurposed for different platforms, they are basically websites that run in an app container (even when a connection to the internet is lost/ you’re offline). But they are a long way from offering the accessibility and usability of native mobile apps for people with disabilities.

A noteable example is the new Skype app that has recently popped up across Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. It showed all of the bad sides of PWAs: complex and confusing navigation for blind and low vision users, loss of keyboard support for those with dexterity or motor difficulties, and focus issues and difficulties identifying and activating controls for both of these groups and others besides.

Microsoft: When it comes to Skype accessibility, we hear you

In a post published on Friday Microsoft outlined planned accessibility improvements for Skype, which is great news for millions of users who have been struggling with the update in recent months.

From the post:

“Across Microsoft, we are working to make technology more accessible and empower people to achieve more. We take feedback very seriously and are grateful to our active accessibility community who point us to areas of improvement. Following recent updates to Skype, your comments helped direct us to the areas of our new versions where change was most needed and could be most impactful.

"We have been working continuously since that time to understand the needs of our customers and have recently issued updates across platforms containing several improvements to address those issues. Accessibility is a journey and there are more fixes to come and we actively want and encourage feedback so we can deliver the right experience that empowers all our customers.”

The outlined changes, slated for all supported platforms using the new web-app version of Skype, will focus on keyboard support (for those who can only use a keyboard and not a mouse), blind users and those with low vision. They include:

• Improving visible keyboard focus - ie ensuring that it's obvious which link or button etc is 'active' as a keyboard user tabs through the application. Without this you have no idea where you are or what you can interact with. The app is effectively unusable.
• Eliminating cases where keyboard focus moves to non-actionable controls - in other words as you Tab through the app you land on things that you can do nothing with. Dead space or eye-candy icons that aren't controls 'capture' your keyboard focus and are confusing and time-consuming.
  
• Ensuring keyboard focus moves back to the controls that opened a dialog or menu after the dialog or menu was closed - so that a keyboard or blind user who opens a pop-up box and chooses a button to close it again, say, is taken back to where they were before and not right at the top of the app once again only to have to Tab dozens of times to get back to where they were.
• Improving the accessible names and labels of controls and improving the control types used - eg making sure that the button to hang up a call, say, is intuitively labelled 'End call' and announced as what it is, a button, and not a something else like a link.

Who’ll be willing to pay for PWA accessibility?

Almost all of the above issues (and many more) that will have to be ‘retro-fitted’ here in this PWA version of Skype, are an automatic aspect of accessibility that you largely get ‘for free’ in native applications – whether it be on Windows, Mac, iOS or Android.

So while Microsoft, with its continuing commitment to inclusion across all its products, is providing in Skype an excellent example of going that ‘extra mile’ to layer accessibility onto this new convoy of PWAs, how many other organisations – including those thousands of solo app developers – will go to that same additional effort and expense?

Despite Microsoft paving the way to more inclusive PWAs, how many others will follow them on this journey? It’s looking like, in a largely PWA-driven future, many people with disabilities will be left by the roadside.

Related blogs: 

• Why the future of apps is good news for developers but bad news for people with disabilities

• Read more from Robin Christopherson - Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being built into our digital world. And there are great opportunities to maximise AI to make the digital world more accessible for people with disabilities. Here, AbilityNet’s senior accessibility and usability consultant Joe Chidzik explores some of the possibilities and some of the ways AI is already changing things for disabled people.

1. AI could provide automatic sign language provision 

The UK government requires websites to meet level AA of the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standard. The requirement for sign language is an AAA requirement under WCAG (higher than AA) so it is very difficult to meet and unfortunately very few websites will do it. It is also difficult to provide sign language for multimedia. With an AI-based service, this could potentially happen automatically, which would be would be of great benefit for people who are deaf or have hearing loss.

Check out further information from Nvidia on AI and sign language. 

Pic credit: Nvidia

2. AI already provides language translation and captioning for people who are deaf

Microsoft offers a free service through the Microsoft Translator app where audio is translated into other languages, and into text (for captions). People who have English as a second language benefit, as do people who are deaf or who have hearing loss.

Read more about Microsoft Translator app helping people who are deaf here. 

3. AI provides automatic image recognition and alt text for people who are blind

One of the most common issues with accessibility is the lack of alternative text for images, which means people who are blind or have sight loss could be missing important information. Google's Cloud Vision API uses neural networks to classify images, and to extract textual information.

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Read related article: How AI is empowering people on the autism spectrum

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There is a great deal of nuance when a web editor is selecting appropriate alt text, depending on the purpose the image is the image decorative, and so should it be ignored? If it’s information-rich, what information is the designer conveying?

We’re not sure if AI could crack these questions, but it would still be a useful step forward for it to automatically give some information when no one has entered information manually.

Find out more about the Cloud Vision API, image recognition and alt text.

4. AI could help make information easier to understand for those with reading difficulties

The internet is full of an ever-growing amount of information. Distilling that information is a challenge that machine learning is working towards. Services are being developed to automatically summarise lengthy articles by creating short abstracts, or related headlines.

If done well - and it might take machines a while to learn to do it really well—this could be good for creating ‘easier-to-read’ content or snapshots of articles to help users with reading difficulties or those who feel easily overwhelmed by information.

Find out more about how AI could help us more quickly find the info we need, on Technology Review and here on Machine Learning Mastery. 

5. AI could eventually make entire websites accessible!

One day AI might be so clever it can automatically make web pages entirely accessible. Until then, you can get your site checked by AbilityNet’s Accessibility team!

Further reading:

• How AI could transform the lives of people with disabilities 
• Microsoft Seeing AI - the best app for blind people just got better