The document discusses the history of innovation in accessibility technologies from the 19th century to today. It describes many important early innovations including the Braille writing system, the telephone, radio, and assistive devices that led to technologies like headphones, speech recognition software, and screen readers. The document argues that accommodating disabilities has often spurred innovations that became mainstream technologies widely used by all.

1. February 2010 Accessibility and Disability A History of Innovation Joint WIPO-ITU Accessibility Workshop

2. Speaker Artur Ortega Accessibility Evangelist Yahoo!

3. Who is Artur Ortega? Blind Software Engineer

4. Innovation A new way of doing something.

5. Innovation A new way of doing something radical and revolutionary. Changes in - thinking - products

6. Accessibility The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is - a stone in a field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. Source: Jose Ortega y Gasset 1883-1955

7. Innovation in the Office

8. The Office of Today

9. Keyboard

10. Keyboard - Pellegrino Turri di Castelnuovo, Countess Carolina Vantoni - Precursor to the typewriter

11. Keyboard - 1960 - Picture based keyboards - Today: McDonald’s

12. Printer

13. Printer - Pellegrino Turri di Castelnuovo - Printer - Ink: Tracing paper coated with coal dust

14. Scanner

15. Scanner & OCR - 1975 - Ray Kurzweil - Reading Machine - Flatbed scanner and OCR technology

16. Telephone

17. Telephone - Alexander Graham Bell - Hearing devices - U.S. patent on telephone

18. Telephone - 1990 - ADA - Accessible phones

19. Telephone 1998 Loopset

20. Radio

21. Radio - Transistor - Graham Bell and Laboratory - Hearing Aids - Sony: Transistor radio

22. Radio Spectrogram Graham Bell Laboratory Making speech visible

23. CPU

24. Binary Code - 1821 - Louis Braille six dot code - Binary code, character set

25. Microphone

26. Microphone - 1917 - E.C. Wente of Bell Laboratories - Condenser microphone

27. Speech Recognition - 1952 - Davis, Biddulph and Balashek of Bell Laboratories - Ten digits: 97 percent accuracy - Today: Dragon NaturallySpeaking

28. Headphones

29. Talking books - 1932 - American Foundation for the blind - Durable long playing record - Today: Audio books

30. Voice Indexing A Guide for Handicapped Visitors” -Today: Apple iPod shuffle 1980 Talking book “Access to National Parks:

31. Speech synthesiser - 1936 - H.W. Dudley of Bell Laboratories - Artificial talking machine - “Voice coder“: "Voder“

32. Applications

33. Subtitling 1960 Pilgrim Imaging Captioned Films for the Deaf Program Today: BBC subtitles 100%

34. Teletype machine - 1964 - Marsters and Weitchrecht - Teletype machine attached to the telephone system - Today: Internet chat and Instant Messaging

35. Email "I have spent, as you can imagine, a fair chunk of my time trying to persuade people with hearing impairments to make use of electronic mail because I found it so powerful myself.“ 1972 Vint Cerf protocols for the ARPANET

36. The Office of the Future Accessibility and Disability The Future of Innovation

37. “ The origins of such technological staples as public address systems, text messaging and even the Internet itself can be traced to innovative accommodations to people with disabilities. This phenomenon is the basis for a growing awareness among engineers, architects and product developers of the significance of universal design in our physical and electronic environments.” - Deborah Kendrick, Cincinnati Inquirer

39. Artur Ortega Accessibility Evangelist Yahoo! Europe Ltd 125 Shaftesbury Avenue London WC2H 8AD United Kingdom [email_address]