Thursday, May 30, 2019

What are the accessibility features that are most useful for you?

Invitation to participate in the 5thGARI Feature Review

Since its creation in 2008, the Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative (GARI) has evolved into a central source of information for mobile accessibility, used by more than 55,000 people every month. GARI is available today in 18 languages and still pursues its mission of helping people to find a device that best fits their individual needs - whether it is a mobile phone for a hard-of-hearing person, a Smart TV for a blind person, a tablet for a person with learning disabilities or a Wearable for a person who cannot move their hands.

One key factor in GARI’s success is that it’s not a top-down approach but rather it’s a collaborative platform - thanks to the regular feature reviews and stakeholder consultations that the Mobile & Wireless Forum (MWF) engages in. In these feature reviews, we invite all stakeholders to comment on the current set of features the database reports on and to suggest new accessibility features to be added.

Coming out of our last review in 2016, we added 14 new features, a summary of which you can find in the blog entry we published at the time: http://blog.gari.info/2017/11/feedback-from-around-world-on-what.html

And now with the beginning of the next Feature Review, It will be interesting to see what new features have gathered your attention since then, and what kind of suggestions you have for improving the experience with GARI in order to ensure that it can continue to fulfill its role of helping people find the best device for them.

If you would like to participate, please have a look at the guidance documents (http://www.mwfai.org/publications.cfm?lang=eng&cat=) and send your contribution to michael.milligan (at) mwfai.org or sabine.lobnig (at) mwfai.org by 31 July 2019.