Let's talk about some assistive technologies, so, you know, when people come to our site to use our
products, those that have disabilities are typically using what's called an assistive technology,
whether that's a device or software.
And there's a wide range of them that are important to understand because it's going to open your mind
to some of the ways that people are interacting with your content and the user experience you're creating
online.
So here are some of them.
We have screen readers.
Now, this is probably a more common one that we've all heard about, but it's a program that helps
the visually impaired understand the content displayed on the page.
So it basically converts digital text and labels and images and descriptions to something that is more
readable by this piece of software.
So you could imagine that they were all they would need to do is press play.
And they could read like an entire block of text.
They could read entire Web pages.
Something else people use our Braille terminals.
Now, those who can't see that well or can see it all use Braille terminals and the round patterns that
come through the halls help blind people actually read and can see what's going on on the screen.
There's also something called a switch or some sort of tap control, which basically is like a joystick.
Or you can use the keyboard spacebar to do this.
But essentially, as you tap on your trackpad or your keyboard, it will help you to navigate the screen.
Again, this may not be the best experience, but it is a way that people are interacting with various
pieces of our content and we really need to take that into account.
Next, we have screen magnification software, which kind of works like a magnifying glass on the screen.
As you can see over here.
It's not like what you would typically see when you hit, you know, like a zoom on your browser.
It's not that everything scales up at once.
It's as the user has control over this little magnifier window inside of the software so that they can
magnify certain elements or a section of the screen or design of a website.
And that reinforces the fact that, you know, all the elements of our design should be scalable.
So you can see over here he has this section actually magnified so he can read it easily.
And lastly, what I have here are Ultranet input software and devices.
As you can imagine, there's also speech input software, which is a lot different than Alexa or Google
home, but basically it allows people to control the computer with their voice.
There's also devices like we see here with the keyboard and the gentleman over here is using a stick
to actually type.
So once again, we need to take into account all the different ways people are interacting with our
website because it will affect the way we approach designing it and developing it.