For many, the rise of ubiquitous computing, touchscreen smartphones, mobile tablets and powerful Web applications is making life easier and more organized. But for those people living with disabilities, who can’t see, using a touchscreen smartphone or tablet can be a frustrating experience. For people who can’t hear, the unifying power of YouTube may be lost.
Naomi Black is focused on ensuring the digital revolution doesn’t leave people with disabilities behind. As the co-lead of Google Inc.’s accessibility engineering team, Ms. Black and her team are tasked with figuring out how the company behind the world’s largest search engine can make its products and services more accessible to people with disabilities.
In an interview with FP Tech Desk editor Matt Hartley, the Canadian-born Ms. Black outlines how her team works with Google engineers to build accessibility features into the company’s Web applications and services.
Q What is your role at Google?
A: Our team has two big responsibilities. One is internal. We work with Google teams to help them make their products more accessible. We’re an engineering team, so we have engineers who can help advise them when they’re building something like Gmail and they want to know how they can make it work better for blind people. Our other role is an external one where I go out and I meet with advocacy groups and I talk to them and I find out what users most need from us.
Q How are you making Google services more accessible for people who are deaf or who are hearing impaired?
A: As we’re moving more and more content online onto the Internet, if that content doesn’t have closed captions, it’s not accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing and that’s a growing number of people if you think about Baby Boomers who are aging. Very few of them would think of themselves as deaf, but if there happens to be closed captions, they tend to have an easier time understanding what’s going on. If you think about YouTube, we want videos on YouTube to cross borders and transcend cultures. So if you really want a global audience on YouTube, you really need to have closed captions and subtitles that are translated into many languages. We’ve been adding a number of features to YouTube to make it as easy as possible for video creators to add closed captions to their videos. We use speech recognition to simplify the process of creating the captions, and we now have an editor that lets you go right in and edit the text of your captions. We even have integration with Google translate so you can do automatic on the fly translation and you can also work with other translators to clean that up.
Q What about blind people or those with vision problems?
A: When you think back to the shift that we had when we went from the command line to Windows 3.11, that was a huge shift for people with disabilities. The command line was very easy to make accessible and they had lots of access to everything in DOS, but we suddenly went to this graphic user interface and nobody thought how a blind person was going to use this, and it took several years for screen readers to emerge that could work with graphical user interfaces. Still, most screen readers today expect the browser to be serving static HTML. When it doesn’t, they make guesses and assumptions about what that dynamic content is and often they guess wrong. If I’m a developer and I’m building a dynamic Web application and I want to make it accessible, I then have to test it on every screen reader that’s out there, every browser that’s out there and every screen reader and browser combination. The way Google is addressing this problem in our own product is that we have a browser with Google Chrome and we also now have a screen reader that we launched in the past year called the Chrome Vox.
Chrome Vox is a screen reader we built using Javascript and Web technologies, and you can install it into Google Chrome as a Web extension. Just like Google Chrome, we update it every six weeks. Our goal with this is then to have a platform with the screen reader and the browser that are integrated that we can then develop our apps, so that when we use things in a standard way, the browser and the screen reader are doing sensible things. So it’s really the combination of being able to innovate in both the web application, and the browser and the screen reader that allows us to begin solving this problem end to end for blind users.
Q How has the smartphone complicated things?
A: In many ways, the rise of the smartphone has terrific potential for people who are blind and who have other disabilities. If you think about what a smartphone can do, it has all these sensors, it’s small, you can carry it in your pocket, and when properly programmed and adapted to your needs, it can provide you with a way to accomodate for those senses that you might be missing. The thing that has been most challenging as smartphones have evolved in the very recent past is the rapid move towards touchscreens. Touchscreens pose problems for people who have dexterity issues, they also pose a lot of problems for people who are blind, who need some way to represent what is shown visually on a completely smooth and indistinguishable surface, they need some way to receive the information from that. So it’s taken us a little while to get there on Android. We’ve just updated the operating system for Jelly Bean and in our accessibility API which is common to the framework and shared to all of the apps on Android. We now have the ability to do linear navigation and the ability to do a number of gestures. In the previous version, if you turned on accessibility and (our mobile screen reader) TalkBack, you would touch the screen and then wherever your finger was, it read whatever was under your finger. This was problematic, because if you think about the size of the icons on a mobile device, and you think about the notification bar or the battery status indicator, these are very small points that you have to hit exactly. And what about a double tap? If you hit it and you move your finger a little bit, are you then going to open the wrong application? That’s how it worked in [operating system versions] Ice Cream Sandwich, in Jelly Bean, what we’ve done is we’ve simplified how this works. So as a blind user, if I touch the screen, we do something called touch exploration. So I touch the screen and it will read what’s under my finger. If I then swipe my finger to the right, it will speak the name of the next icon and I can keep exploring in a linear way by swiping my finger to the right, and in this way I can figure out everything that’s on the screen without having to fumble around with my finger on this representation of the touchscreen.
financialpost.com, Nov 22, 2012