Training bookings continue at a steady pace towards the middle of the year. Our most popular sessions were bespoke sessions with general Accessibility Awareness and either Accessible Word Documents or Accessible Social Media mixed in depending on the needs of the organisation being trained. Recent sessions include a couple of training sessions organised by and through SUSE who were kind enough to offer our training through their contacts portal.
We were at The Gathering a few weeks ago where it was good to meet some of you share contact details for future training sessions. We have already arranged some of these and look forward to following up on others.
It’s also steady take-up on the CPD accredited e-learning (details at the end of this article).
Upcoming courses in development include a short course on Accessibility and AI which we will trial shortly. It’s been really interesting looking into AI while researching this training especially where it will impact digital accessibility and am genuinely becoming more and more impressed by the day.
While AI may have both positive and negative impacts in other areas its impact on digital accessibility is heading strongly towards the positive in my opinion. Most of my experience with it so far has been in the form of apps which perform a variety of functions to assist people with sensory and communication disabilities.
The first app I tried was Be My Eyes which is a phone camera app where a volunteer could access the camera on the phone of someone with a visual impairment to describe whatever it was they were pointing it at. Examples could be labels on items or signs that could be read out to them. This app now has an AI version called Be My AI which produces a detailed alternative text description of any image that is taken via the app. See the fairly random image I took while writing this article and it’s Be My Eyes generated description for an example of how detailed it can be.
About 10 seconds after taking this picture the app generated the following description:
A wooden office table with three books, a small round dish, and a plush lion holding a small gray mouse toy. The plush lion is near the far edge of the table, facing forward. It is brown with a light tan face and a long white mane. A paper tag is attached on the right side. On the near half of the table are three books: A blue book titled “GAUDÍ,” with an illustrated cover showing colorful mosaic-style architecture. A light blue/gray book with the author name “Erik Linde” on the cover; the rest of the title is too small to read clearly. A green book titled “Derek Jarman’s Garden,” with a cover photo of a person and plants. A small shallow round dish or coaster sits to the left of the books. In the background are office chairs, cabinets, papers, and a printer. A person is partially visible at the top right, but no face is visible.
On the AI assistive technology front for people with hearing loss there are apps which can analyse the users environment to separate speech from background noise, apps that can provide live captions and apps that can track a speakers lip movements as well as many others.
In other areas there are apps that can simplify complex text making it easier to read and understand, write or rewrite your own text in many different styles. For the physically disabled there are AI powered exoskeletons, smart wheelchairs, eye tracking systems, smart systems to control your environment. The list goes on and I’m going to have a look at as many of them as I can and it’s sure to be a very interesting project.
If you produce any AI assistive technology or know of any that could be interesting please contact me on the email below and I’ll have a look.
If you are interested in any of our training (see here for our training details) please contact me on james.duncan@disabilityscot.org.uk to arrange training for yourself or your organisation at a time to suit you. Our training, whether in-person or e-learning, is currently free. The only charge you might have is if you want in-person training and you are not in Edinburgh. In this case you would make a donation to cover travelling expenses.
Recent training session feedback includes:
This training supported our team to reflect on our current documents and social media presence and how best we can adapt these to make access easier for disabled people.
Thank you to James for providing this informative bespoke training session, we came away with a long to do list!
James was a very calm trainer with a great deal of knowledge that was clearly imparted during the session