David Heath
Sunday, 18 October 2009 08:24
Your IT -
Home IT
A very significant number of people in the world are either born with or acquire disabilities in their lifetime. Recognising this, Google has created a single location to bring together all resources available to support these people.
Jonas Klink, Accessibility Product Manager, writing in the Official Google
blog announced the new Google accessibility
page.
the UN points out that around 10% of the world's population live with some kind of
disability, making them the world's largest minority group.
Klink writes, "This week we've launched a handy new website for Accessibility at Google to pull all our existing resources together: www.google.com/accessibility. Here you can follow the latest accessibility updates from our blogs, find resources from our help center, participate in a discussion group, or send us your feedback and feature requests. Around here, we often say, "launch early and iterate" - meaning, get something out the door, get feedback, and then improve it. In that tradition, our accessibility website is pretty simple, and we expect this site to be the first of many iterations. We're excited about the possibilities."
In the spirit of "launch early and iterate," Klink asks for plenty of feedback in order to improve both the accessibility resources themselves and the means of promoting them. Feedback may be provided
here.
My own proposal? As well as focussing on improving the utility of the software solutions, make use of the current resources (Google maps etc) to highlight disability resources within the community. Things such as disability-enhanced public transport access points, the location of hearing-loop ATMs etc.