The team at Dolphin have again had the pleasure of working with Blind in Business, to hold work experience for 14 young people with vision impairments.
This work experience is held virtually, as the students go to different colleges around the country. This has the benefit of enabling us to take more students on, who met with us over MS Teams to complete work experience with our Support, Marketing and Testing departments.
As part of their experience with the marketing department, each student was asked to write a guest blog. The standard of work they produced was so high, that we are again delighted to be able to publish a selection of these blogs over the course of this week.
The first is Daniel's blog. He talks about the impact assistive tech has on his everyday life and the benefits digital accessibility has on his passion for technology and game design. He also offers some advice to companies on how they might try and ensure their own products are accessible for blind and partially sighted people.
My name is Daniel and I have been blind my whole life. I have never known what it is like to see.
I use braille and my computer to do my school work and become more independent at home. I was taught how to use a laptop in year 2 and from that day I have always loved technology. However, a lot of technology is still not accessible.
I have recently begun developing my own video games and I was not able to access the technology that many game developers take for granted. I also did not understand the concepts of 3D environments and why things had to look nice.
In year 6 my friends were taught scratch but I was instructed to do some reading instead. This was because scratch was “not accessible.” This problem has persisted through out my life and even into secondary school where I still can not use some of the technology that others can use. But, the thing that I have wanted to do for a long time is play computer games with my friends and family. It was these limitations that made me even more interested in technology, and by extension, coding.
For me, assistive technology means a chance to finally do the things I have always wanted to do, such as coding my own video games.
Without assistive technology, I would not be able to do the things I enjoy. Of course, there are still technologies which I still cannot access - because many developers do not put accessible features in their apps - But assistive technology allows me to be limited mostly by my own skill levels.
My favourite kind of assistive technology is the technology that I can forget about when I use it. These kinds of assistive technologies make my experience more natural-feeling. One example of this is my phone: I use it everyday and I do not need to think about the Voice Over on my phone because it just works all the time.
Voice assistants are one of my favourite types of assistive technology. Especially now, with AI being able to understand voice commands, it is easier for me to use my devices for things like research.
Like any other young person, my day to day life practically revolves around technology. I watch videos on my phone using Voice Over, I do my school work and programming on my laptop using screen readers. Even my lights are controlled by a voice assistant - though that is because I am just a bit lazy!
I am even writing this blog on my laptop and I am using a screen reader to do it.
It has not always worked out nicely though, there are still some things I have trouble accessing, whereas other tech provides too much information on the screen at once, which can make it difficult to use.
For example, I have recently been learning to code the Commodore 64 - a retro game console. I have found that the software required to code it on the laptop is either completely inaccessible or too overwhelming in the amount of information it provides me at once. Even when I just code in python I find this is still a problem. I am good at finding solutions to this sort of problem though, so I use the command prompt to run my code instead of running it inside the code editor, and switch to more minimalist text-based software as necessary.
Another way I use assistive technology is to learn about my surroundings. I use apps like Seeing AI and I used to use Meta Glasses. However, due to regulatory reasons the 'look and tell me' feature was removed from the Meta Glasses.
In my mobility sessions I have recently begun learning to do my shopping with assistive technology. One of the hardest but the most important things to learn, in my opinion, is that assistive technology is a tool and it might not work for every situation. This is why everyone who uses assistive technology should learn how to do things without it.
According to the NHS, around 340,000 people are registered as blind in the UK.
As this is quite a significant number of people, this makes it very important for companies to make their products and their website accessible. There are many ways a company can do this and most of these methods are not very complex or time consuming.
Something as simple as labelling buttons and putting alt text in images will go a long way to allow blind users to access the product or service. With advancements in AI and other technologies, companies can create more accessible products faster and better than ever before.
Sometimes the best way to make a digital product accessible is to simplify the user interface. This does not mean that features have to be removed, it just means that maybe instead of having large numbers of colourful images and buttons on the screen, there could be less images and more text.
If companies do not want to simplify their user interface for all users they can provide an option for blind users to use when needed. In my opinion if companies and organisations work to create more accessible products and websites, it will create a more inclusive environment and allow blind people to have more freedom and independence.
If companies want to know how they can make their products accessible, they should just ask the blind community - because we know what works for us!
If you are interested to find out how you can make your website more accessible for people with vision impairments, check out the Dolphin Digital Accessibility Checklist or download our free Website Accessibility Guide