Stevie Wonder on Steve Jobs: The Man Behind Accessibility
I know that a lot of you have probably already seen this amazing video, but for some reason I missed it. Probably because I’ve been asleep all weekend, so I’m reposting it again in case you guys were also preoccupied with other stuff. Here is singer songwriter Stevie Wonder, who happens to be blind from childhood, singing the praises of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for making the iPhone and iPad handicap-friendly.
I’m going to assume that Wonder, who made a surprise appearance at the WONDERFUL event at the Echoplex in Echo Park where the above video was taken, is referring specifically to the VoiceOver function of iOS where blind users can touch the device screen to hear a description of the item under their fingers as well as optional features like the Bluetooth braille keyboard and existing services like Facetime. Wonder’s exact words: “I want you all to give a hand to someone that you know whose health is very bad at this time…. His company took the challenge in making his technology accessible to everyone. In the spirit of caring and moving the world forward: Steve Jobs. Because there’s nothing on the iPhone or the iPad that you can do that I can’t do. As a matter of fact, I can be talking to you, you can be looking at me, and I can be doing whatever I need to do and you don’t even know what I’m doing.”
Oftentimes many of us in the industry overlook the difficulties that some of us face in interacting with technology, so props to Wonder, Jobs, and others for bringing these concerns and the progress being made in tech accessibility to light. We’ve still got a long way to go.
Alexia Tsotsis: The Tech Nerd Under the Radar
Alexia Tsotsis is a big nerd who’s working on something under the radar. Before this she was at business school and before that, she was at TechCrunch. View her bio here: Alexia Tsotsis.
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