[Colorado-talk] The craze for touch-screen gadgets is raising worries that a whole generation of consumer electronics will be out of the reach of the blind

[Chris Foster]

Hello List members, 
The below article is a perfect example of 
 what the National federation of the blind can do with its resources to
bring awareness of issues facing blind people into the public arena.
Many of the people quoted in the article are members of our NFB family,
while others are partnering with us.  When my wife logged on to
Yahoo.com last night, this article was the first headline she saw.
Enjoy, Chris Foster 
 
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The craze for touch-screen gadgets, sparked by
Apple Inc's popular iPhone, is raising worries that a whole generation
of consumer electronics will be out of the reach of the blind.
 
Motown icon Stevie Wonder and other advocates came to the world's
biggest gadget fest, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas
this week, to convince vendors to consider the needs of the blind.
 
Wonder told a CES event that his wishlist included a car he could drive
-- which he acknowledged was probably "a ways away" -- and a Sirius XM
satellite radio he could operate.
 
"If you can take those few steps further, you can give us the
excitement, the pleasure and the freedom of being a part of it," said
the famed musician.
 
Wonder said some companies had managed to make their products more
accessible to the blind, sometimes without even meaning to. He cited an
iPod music player and Research in Motion's BlackBerry as gadgets he
likes to use.
 
Advocates argue that if product designers take into account blind needs,
they would make electronics that are easier to use for the sighted as
well.
 
The good news is that manufacturers do not need to put large sums of
money into making products accessible, nor would they have to forsake
innovation, said Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National
Federation For The Blind.
 
"We don't want to hold up technological progress," he said. "What we're
saying is, think about the interface and set it up in such a way that
it's simple .... The simpler you make the user interface of a product,
it's going to reach more people sighted or blind."
 
TOUCH SCREENS
 
With the popularity of touch screens, once simple products such as
televisions and stereos have become difficult for blind people to use as
they often require navigation of multiple menus that need to be seen to
be used effectively.
 
"That's an increasing problem with new digital devices. It's easy to add
feature after feature that's buried under menu after submenu," said Mike
Starling, chief technology officer of National Public Radio, which is
working on accessible options.
 
Manufacturers have been putting touch screens in everything from
calculators and watches to computers and music players.
 
Sendero Group President Mike May, who is blind, joked, "Can I ski 60
miles an hour downhill? Yes. Use a flat panel microwave? No." Sendero
makes GPS navigational devices that have an audio output for the blind.
 
There are also screen readers that give an audio reading of a phone's
menu. But Anne Taylor, director of access technologies at the National
Federation for the Blind, says they do not yet help her to use a
touch-screen phone.
 
She said the ability to use a device without needing to look at it could
help sighted people who are driving or older people whose eyesight is
starting to deteriorate.
 
While blind users can buy screen-reading software for $300 upward, it
tends to only work on certain phones, often the most expensive
smartphones. Sendero said accessible technology is often expensive, and
about 70 percent of the U.S. blind population is unemployed.
 
Taylor is using CES as a forum to present vendors a set of suggestions
for product design that she sees benefiting both sighted and blind
consumers.
 
For example, manufacturers could include an easy-to-use start-over
button, different sounds for different menus, and controls with good
tactile feedback. 
 
PROGRESS 
 
Ahead of the show, there were some signs that vendors, while unlikely to
give up on the touch-screen trend, may be more ready to consider
consumers with disabilities. 
 
Developers at Google Inc are working on ways to make touch-screen
phones, including those based on its own Android mobile software, usable
for blind people. 
 
National Public Radio announced a special radio receiver technology and
software that would connect a digital radio to a dynamic Braille
generating device. It has also created special digital radio channels
for readings of the day's newspapers. 
 
Dice Electronics has made a prototype radio that incorporates the NPR
technology, and NPR's Starling hopes this will become a commercial
product in 2009. 
 
Starling has also set up meetings at CES with other manufacturers in the
hope they will include NPR's technology. He said responses to requests
for information, which often go unheeded, are much more active this
year. 
 
Some manufacturers could use their production facilities to make such
devices, as demand weakens for more mainstream products in the economic
downturn, he said. 
 
"I think in general there may be a view that accessibility may be
becoming the new green," said Starling. 
 
(For more news from the Consumer Electronics Show, please click on
http://www.reuters.com/news/topics/CES and visit the Reuters MediaFile
blog at http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile) 
 
(Reporting by Sinead Carew; editing by Richard Chang)