Making Tech More Accessible

Here are two different types of accessible technology above. The first one is a photo I added which has a description linked to it for those who use accessible technology. The second one is a video, I added subtitles to my video to make it more accessible to a wide range of people. These two simple ways of adding more accessibility to my everyday posts were very easy, took little to no effort, and can reach a further audience.

Interestingly enough, when adding images I rarely add descriptions with them, but this does affect me regularly when I’m using my text-to-speech technology. In fact, when there is an image posted without a description I’m usually annoyed that the image doesn’t get explicitly described, which goes to show that we all can learn to make changes.

I also noticed when using certain text readers with articles or journals will read not only the paragraphs or texts, but it will also read anything in the headers and footers. While reading texts manually that have headers and footers, the average person will be able to easily skip past the deemed unuseful information (for that moment) but when using apps for text-to-speech the program doesn’t know that that text is not considered helpful and will read out those headers and footers mid-reading. This is confusing because, unless you able visibly able to see that the headers and footers are being read, this information could seem as if it is a part of the article and lose users’ engagement in what is being read.

In all, with technology seeping more and more into the education realm, there are, of course, hindrances but I believe the overall positive aspects of accessibility outweigh those issues in tech and soon these problems will no longer be at the forefront.