Accessibility is not just for people with disabilities

Raymond Chen, wrote some good thoughts about accessibility and how it relates to people with disabilities and people without disabilities earlier today.

I have to say I agree whole heartedly with Raymond when he says:

Finally, check out this screencast showing off Vista's speech recognition system. The "Say what you see" feature which Chris discusses at time code 8:52 needs to get the name of every element on the screen so it can take what you say and look for it on the screen. If your program doesn't expose these names, the "Say what you see" feature won't know what the user needs to say to click on your button, and users will say, "Harumph, why doesn't this program work with voice recognition? All my other programs do."

My secret hope is that "Say what you see" will finally be enough to prod people into taking accessibility seriously. Because it's not just for people with disabilities.

I've already seen Windows Vista's speech recognition features make a difference inside the company in terms of accessibility support. More and more teams here at Microsoft are using our own technology in Vista to test Microsoft accessibility support. It's great to see the ecosystem feeding on itself like this.

Then, once Vista ships and is in hands of millions of developers everywhere, they'll finally see a great reason to ensure that their applications are very accessible.

If you're a developer and want to learn more about making your application accessible, check out the MSDN accessibility website.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2006
  Hello Rob:
  
  The availability of speech recognition integrated with Vista is very exciting to both the able and disabled community.  When things are made available for everyone they become less expensive.  I use adaptive software to enlarge and read things on my computer ($600).  I use a PDA sized device which also reads to me ($400).  All of these things were engineered for the blind.  The blind community is a very small community.  Items engineered for that community are very expensive.  When things are engineered for everyone they are less expensive.  Speech recognition in Vista is free!!
  Frequently students with disabilities hesitate to use speech recognition, since this makes them look different from everybody else.  Now that everybody else will be using speech recognition no one will have to feel different any longer.  Thanks to Microsoft and the speech recognition crew.
  Jim Nuttall -- Michigan