What are /r/accessibility's favorite Products & Services?

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From experience, I can tell you that bringing in accessibility as soon as possible will make things go much faster. If you bring in accessibility at the end, you'll find yourselves having to go back and redo things that you thought were already done, possibly even starting from scratch. I would suggest at the bare minimum you and your developer do the accessibility 101 course at Udacity, it's free and will give you a great head start, preventing you making the most common mistakes. Then test, all the way through the process. Test with tools and manually test with screen readers.

Google has a free product for Android phones, Live Transcribe. I have used it personally for both communicating with deaf people and to hear myself in difficult situations.

Android has a live captioning application, Live Transcribe, that overlays captions over any media that is being played on your phone, but it's not perfect... I'm sorry about their decision. :/

Live Transcribe on Google Play Store

Google has its web accessibility course for free on udacity, and the very first video is one of my very favorite videos on helping someone understand the value of web accessibility: https://www.udacity.com/course/web-accessibility--ud891

Something like this may work for you. It can be folded and put in a van or just taken inside immediately after use, so you don't leave it out.

This seller has different lengths available, I only needed a 3ft one for a 2 ft rise at my house, so I am not sure what length you'd need based on the height change the 5 steps covers.

Mine is similar, but is just aluminum, no black tread material, it's ridged in the design so no tread is needed on mine.

The thought behind this product is that you aren't modifying the property, or leaving it after you use it, so using this should be acceptable.

Thank you so much! I've never really gone too deep into the world of accessibility because I always figured it would be too expensive and I always thought I got by just fine. I really had no idea how much accessible/adaptive technology existed until recent years. I was looking into keyboard options for typing with my feet and the only one I found was <em>this</em>, but it's not something I can afford right now.

Serenade might actually be a game changer! It's not something I'll be able to use all the time since my PC is in the living room but I can at least use it while everyone is out at work during the day. I'm going to download it and try it out, it looks amazing!

Thanks again for all the info, I really appreciate it!

Can they bend down at all? If so, a pull out sliding rack for pots and pans may let you keep them in the lower cabinets. Alternatively, you may be able to store them on the countertop with something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Organizer-Cabinet-Methods-Adjustable-Anti-slip/dp/B07R9RY2WT/ref=asc_df_B07R9RY2WT/

Sounds like your manager is pretty ignorant to the entire idea. You could do a little math using the tables here https://thenextweb.com/podium/2019/09/27/the-huge-cost-of-ignoring-accessibility-when-designing-your-website/ to estimate a legal complaint cost of your own. Depending on which industry you work in, you may also be losing out on huuuge marketshare ignoring the needs of ~20% of the population.

Fortunately, they themselves call out in their docs that headless/in-browser automated testing will be required, as will manual testing.

As far as solutions out there go claiming to be "accessible forward", I don't really mind this one... at least it isn't like AccessiBe claiming to solve all of your accessibility woes with the click of a button.

I would like to point out that there are packages within other frameworks that will nag at you if you do something bad - packages such as Ember A11Y.

-Enhance your brand

-Increase market reach - the disability population in the U.S alone is about 30% (1 in 5 people).

-Increase sales - (over 1.3 billion people on earth living with disabilities). In the United States of America alone, disability populations are estimated to have over $645.3 Billion in disposable income while their family and friends have over $3.9 Trillion in disposable income annually, according to the 2016 Annual Report – The Global Economics of Disability.

-Boost image reputation - subsequently as a result of the above

-Minimize legal risk - the number of federal lawsuits filed in response to digital inaccessibility tripled from 814 to 2,258 (from 2017 to 2018).

Why You Should Make Your Website WCAG 2.0/2.1 AA Accessible?

Why should you make your website accessible to individuals with disabilities?

Why should your digital asset be compliant with ADA, Section 508, EN 301 549, BITV 2.0 or any standard regulation?

https://www.slideshare.net/WhoIsAccessible/why-you-should-make-your-website-wcag-2021-aa-accessible-216522135

They make mice with a single button. If the motor control of the cursor is good and you’re just looking to minimize accidental button clicks, they may be a good solution to try. This is the first one that came by while searching - I don’t have experience with any single-button mice so I don’t have a specific recommendation unfortunately.

Chester Creek Technologies Ctmo One-Button Optical Tiny Mouse https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001P4Q45U/

We've done a great deal to make it accessible to screen reader users, other keyboard only users, low vision users, and more. We've documented this https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?issue_tags=accessibility

"Accessibility Godfather" in this case was just a silly term Dries used for me ages ago.

As far as your experience with Drupal, I'd have to ask what barriers you might face and what other systems you are used to using. As far as Drupal goes, our focus has been on Drupal Core. It is open-source software so you can set a sit up wrong and over-ride the defaults if you want to.

You can definitely still get landline-style base stations/extra handsets that offer Bluetooth connectivity. e.g. Something like this. I'm not 100% sure how the answering machine interfaces (or doesn't) with the connected phone, but at the very least phone > traditional handset routing is doable.

It's worth thinking through what could go wrong and setting things up accordingly like tweaking the iPhone's update preferences to make sure it's not going to go restarting itself automatically and ending up disconnected and more in that vein.

If other phones ever do become a feasible option you could look at something like the Jitterbug flip phone too. Something specifically designed to be more accessible, partially by way of being a hell of a lot simpler.

Via HN. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829357

Current top comment, by HN user jamesbrownuhh:

>It's hard to over-state the power and value of having a text transcript of any kind of spoken material like this. It literally unlocks a world of possibilities - not just for search and video indexing, both massively useful in themselves, but also to make such talks genuinely digitally accessible, in such a way that they can be read and interpreted by people who cannot hear, or a worldwide audience of people who don't necessarily have English as a first or second language. > >Caption all the things. There are so many benefits that it's just daft not to.

Narrator is a bit klunky at times and a PPT conversion to PDf not always clean. If you moved the fields around in PPT before filling them, or your slides have dif layouts, that could be an issue too.

This is a cool, FREE Text to Speech tool you can drag/drop your pdf page into. https://www.naturalreaders.com/ it might give you an accessibility test with somethine other than Narrator.

There is also a subscription rate which likely gives you more accesses to the magic. They do have edu special that allows for free subscription in some covid related situations.

It's not clear what you are trying to accomplish, so just a word of warning if you are trying to make an online meeting accessible:

You really need to consult with a qualified accessibility specialist/disability service provider. Auto-transcriptions are often not an adequate accommodation for deaf and hard of hearing individuals.

Having said that, if you are instead trying to make a recording/archive accessible:

Auto transcriptions can be a useful starting point for creating captions and making recordings accessible and 508-conformant.

I second otter.ai as a first choice for this service.

Message me if you want more help...

Zoom is currently beta testing live captioning within Zoom app. I have seen it in action and it works really well. >95% accuracy. As of now, only the main rooms are supported, not in breakout rooms.

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I currently use Otter.ai, put my phone next to the speaker, and copy and paste the link to a browser. This bypasses the permissions system in Zoom.

I have Enterprise accounts on both Otter.ai and Zoom.

Here's a book about a visually impaired little girl and her kitten: 'Don't Let the Kitten Drive the Car: A Tiny Girl's Terrific Tale'

Synopsis

Don’t Let the Kitten Drive the Car!’ is a heart warming, slice-of-life tale about a ten-year-old girl, Akriti and her pet kitten, Simba. Akriti is like any other school girl, except for the fact that she is visually impaired. Her life is full of both rainbows and dark clouds, as makes new friends and learns how to stand up to the class bullies. Three month old Simba is a cute, white ball of fluff with a pink button nose. He thinks that he is the most intelligent kitten in the whole world and that humans are not as brainy as cats.

Simba’s adorable antics win over the members of the Gupta household. He even manages to melt the heart of crusty old Dadaji, who used to think that cats were a bad omen. Pick up this book and follow the dynamic duo of Akriti and Simba along on their adventures. Peep into their little world as they learn unexpected and delightful lessons from each other.

If you are someone who loves to curl up with a book on a rainy day, then you will love ‘Don’t Let the Kitten Drive the Car!’

Nice! I still find it odd that there's no realtime, on-demand captioning built into iOS. Google has Live Transcribe for Android, but iOS has a bunch of third-party apps. While those might be fine for personal use, it becomes a different conversation for the enterprise where companies are concerned about data transfer, storage, processing, etc.

What about Google Lookout? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.accessibility.reveal&amp;hl=en_US