CES Participants Urged to Consider the Blind As Well

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2009, representatives of blind people's associations urged tech companies not to dismiss their needs when creating innovation, especially in the field of touchscreen devices. They are the new hype, a trend set forward by Apple Inc.'s iPhone, but they are unusable to blind people, and some say that they could miss out on an entire generation of applications because of their handicap.

"We don't want to hold up technological progress. What we're saying is, think about the interface and set it up in such a way that it's simple. The simpler you make the user interface of a product, it's going to reach more people sighted or blind," argued National Federation For The Blind spokesman, Chris Danielsen.

"If you can take those few steps further, you can give us the excitement, the pleasure and the freedom of being a part of it," added famed musician Stevie Wonder, who also attended gatherings at CES to raise awareness on the issue. He said that, if companies were to build devices that satisfied the needs of the blind as well, those devices could also be far easier to use for sighted people.

National Public Radio chief technology officer Mike Starling said "That's an increasing problem with new digital devices. It's easy to add feature after feature that's buried under menu after submenu." But these menus are most of the time inaccessible to blind people.

Some solutions to this problem could include the use of specific beeps, which could make the blind aware of the menu or submenu they are in at a certain point, or even hooking up a dynamic Braille machine to various touchscreen devices, which could generate the information displayed on-screen in Braille. Also, adding vocal depictions of the items shown could make it easier for blind people to navigate the phones' menus.

Already, some major companies announced that, as soon as the market evened out, in terms of sales and revenues, they would focus their attention on making existing devices more accessible to the blind, saying that this was a segment of the market that was yet untapped by the industry.