The tech news story that goes undercovered – accessibility products

Monica Chin of The Verge writes about why accessibility products are undercovered in technological innovation journalism.

Chin writes, “More than 25 percent of US older people have a disability, but arduous and centralized accessibility information is even now hard to find for even the largest tech releases. I requested accessibility-focused writers across the tech and gaming space how the media industry can superior cover assistive engineering, and the answer, it turns out, is that it’s a little bit also early to be inquiring that concern. The most important retailers aren’t continually masking it, many of the writers felt. They ought to start off performing so.

“In reporting this piece, I set out to discuss to the reporters on staff members at important tech publications who generally include assistive technologies. I extremely quickly acquired that there are not several.

“Over the past ten years or so, ‘accessibility tech’ — broadly, devices, software package, and functions personalized in the direction of disabled users — has slowly grow to be a public precedence for significant tech firms. Even far more a short while ago, it’s come to be typical for organizations like Apple and Google to include things like an ‘accessibility’ area in their conferences and keynotes. Alt text and audio descriptions have develop into an expectation across the world wide web, and blockbuster game titles are transport with sprawling accessibility menus. Microsoft opened a 2,000-sq.-foot lab dedicated to inclusive gadgets this calendar year. There is an audience for these kinds of technologies, or at the very least the world’s biggest corporations are betting that there is.

“Still, accessibility stories are overwhelmingly assigned to freelancers, or to staff writers whose primary defeat is anything else.”

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