July 17th - Accessibility Options

Android Accessibility Options

Androids have many accessibility options that would be beneficial to a variety of people with diverse impairments. 

• People with visual impairments would benefit from varying font size and screen brightness. They would also benefit from the talk back option, text to speech, speak password and colour inversions and contrast options.  
• People with hearing impairments would benefit from the caption option.
• People with motor impairments would benefit from touch and hold delay, switch access, and pointer speed.
• People who are non-verbal would benefit from the speech output options.
• People with learning disabilities would benefit from spell checker and speech input services.
• People with English as their additional language of options to switch to their own language.

Chromebook Accessibility Options

Chromebooks have many accessibility options that would be beneficial to a variety of people with diverse impairments.

• People with visual impairments would benefit from varying cursor size and higher contrast. Also the onscreen keyboard could also be of use. ChromeVox could be used to hear options that they select. There are numerous extensions that would be helpful. 
• People with motor impairments would benefit the sticky keys option and the keyboard auto repeat option.
• People with learning disabilities would benefit various extenions like CoWriter and Google Read & Write.
• People with English as their additional language of options to switch to their own language.

iPad iOS9

Hearing Accessibility - There were lots of similar options to other platforms such as subtitles/captions. The two that I have not seen before was the ability to sync with Bluetooth hearing aids and the prefer audio descriptions.

Physical Access - There seemed to be a lot of options within options. The switch control options would allow you to customize based on the individual.

Siri - This technology is like the technology that you would see in movies growing up. Being able to vocally communicate with a technology benefits so many people. The options of speech to text and text to speech are extremely helpful for students with learning disabilities.

VoiceOver - This options is extremely important to visually impaired and blind people. This allows people to independently navigate their own devices. 

Mac Laptop/PC

Like the other platforms there are many options for peoples' diverse needs on both the Mac and PC. The accessibility feature on the Mac that jumped out at me was the braille feature. The laptop can be used with a braille display.