Thursday, May 17, 2018

Over 100 accessibility features in my phone – how do I know what helps me?

The Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) every year provides the opportunity to assess how far we’ve come in regards to accessibility, to readjust where we want to go and to discuss which should be the next steps to get there. 

For this year’s GAAD, we have prepared a draft feature guide for GARI. The intention is to give users an overview at one glance of the 120 accessibility features listed in GARI along with thoughts as to who they might be useful for. Using this guide, we invite users to go and explore the database for devices that provide these features in order to find a device that best suits one’s needs.

You can download the draft feature guide here: 


We would love to hear from you, if our categorisation is useful, or if you would change things around. The categories are based on those used by well-established international organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO). Since one feature or function can serve users in different ways, a feature might be listed in multiple categories. 

“Captions” for example make video content accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing users but are also helpful to people with comprehension difficulties or non-native speakers of any given language. “Screen-readers” on the other hand are a very specialised feature that is mostly used by blind users. 

Looking forward to hearing your feedback and happy GAAD 2018! 

Feedback can be sent to accessibility(at)mwfai.org


Links: 

Global Accessibility Awareness Day, 17 May 2018: http://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/

Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative (GARI):