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One trend I've been noticing recently is accessibility technology gaining widespread use among non-disabled people. For example, many people watch Netflix with

One trend I've been noticing recently is accessibility technology gaining widespread use among non-disabled people. For example, many people watch Netflix with the subtitles on or use a voice assistant to type messages. Could hearing aid technology be headed in this direction? A lot of consumer hearing aids have debuted recently, not to mention the Airpods' hearing aid-like functionality. Imagine being able to automatically filter out background noise and amplify voice frequencies at the same time. Or maybe using a positional audio "beacon" to locate a lost item. Or perhaps being able to tune into a muted TV or movie screen and receive audio in your native language. There are a lot of possibilities in this space and I'm excited to see what comes next.

conradludgate 5y ago
Accessibility is great when you want to quickly get the gist of something without devoting all your focus and energy to it. For TV, subtitles let you watch in a noisy environment, or you didn't quite catch that word but you already read ahead in the text (admittedly, that can ruin some jokes) My over-ear headphones already have a audio passthrough mode that's designed for speech, so it let's through the standard speech frequencies but background noise is usually kept out. Crossings in the UK are designed to stand out for the hard-of-sight, it ends up making it really easy to quickly glance and notice a crossing for me. I wish my phone could automatically transcribe phone calls. I have trouble understanding people, especially when the call breaks up, and I hate having to speak like a news presenter for the other side. Accessibility ends up helping everyone
cameronh90 5y ago
Aside: Subtitles on TV has been a thing as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, when I went to the doctor's office they'd have 2 TVs, one with sound playing cartoons, one muted playing the news - both with subtitles. But I like the general gist of what you're saying. Perhaps accessibility technologies should be given more prominence in software even for fully abled people. I've seen plenty of people using pointer trails and locators, and of course tabbing through inputs is sometimes considered an accessibility feature (I believe you have to enable it in MacOS?). Back when I used MacOS, I used to use screen zooming all the time just to focus on what I was interested on and hide distractions. And there's a campaign here in the UK to put subtitles on all kids TV to improve literacy.

conradludgate 5y ago

Accessibility is great when you want to quickly get the gist of something without devoting all your focus and energy to it. For TV, subtitles let you watch in a noisy environment, or you didn't quite catch that word but you already read ahead in the text (admittedly, that can ruin some jokes) My over-ear headphones already have a audio passthrough mode that's designed for speech, so it let's through the standard speech frequencies but background noise is usually kept out. Crossings in the UK are designed to stand out for the hard-of-sight, it ends up making it really easy to quickly glance and notice a crossing for me. I wish my phone could automatically transcribe phone calls. I have trouble understanding people, especially when the call breaks up, and I hate having to speak like a news presenter for the other side. Accessibility ends up helping everyone

cameronh90 5y ago

Aside: Subtitles on TV has been a thing as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, when I went to the doctor's office they'd have 2 TVs, one with sound playing cartoons, one muted playing the news - both with subtitles. But I like the general gist of what you're saying. Perhaps accessibility technologies should be given more prominence in software even for fully abled people. I've seen plenty of people using pointer trails and locators, and of course tabbing through inputs is sometimes considered an accessibility feature (I believe you have to enable it in MacOS?). Back when I used MacOS, I used to use screen zooming all the time just to focus on what I was interested on and hide distractions. And there's a campaign here in the UK to put subtitles on all kids TV to improve literacy.