Transcript of Making Your Organization Accessible to People With Disabilities webinar

1. For Tom Babinski
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Before I introduce our presenter which I typically do at this point, I just want to kind to state for
the record that one of the reasons that I felt like this is an important webinar for us to do is really
just to bring more attention to the need for accessibility tools and procedures in organizations
and this was kind of brought home to me when I realized that go webinar which is the service
that we used to present our sessions every week doesn’t have accessibility really built into it. So,
we’re providing this webinar on accessibility in a platform that has no capabilities for
accessibility.
So, with that said, I do want to introduce our presenter, Tom Babinszki is the Director of Even
Grounds and Accessibility Consulting Company that helps make the web and software accessible
to people with disabilities. Tom has worked with disability advocacy group since he was a
teenager. He promotes accessibility at conferences and through organizational trainings. Tom is
passionate about helping people with disabilities to realize their dreams and showing
organizations how to be more inclusive to all people. With that, take it away, Tom.
Tom Babinszki:
Good afternoon. My name is Tom Babinszki. Thank you so much for joining us today. I guess
primarily I owe you an explanation here. There is this magic word, ‘accessibility’. I was
running my company for a couple of years and people kept coming back to me asking, ‘So what
is really accessibility?’ Unfortunately, there isn’t a better way to say this but there is a good way
to explain it hopefully so let me start with that.
‘Accessibility’ means that everything that’s available to one person is available to everybody
else. Now, this is a broad statement and it’s more like an ideal or a dream. It’s unfortunately
never going to happen but when we talk about accessibility for the most part, we tend to mean
that information or the environment is available, achievable, approachable to people with
disabilities.

2. So when you hear the word, ‘accessibility’, it has to do with people with disabilities in general
unless it’s specified otherwise and this is what I’m going to talk about today and there’s a lot to
talk about all kinds of other aspects of accessibility but one hour is way too short to [cut 03:51]
that to [unclear 03:55]. What I would like to mention briefly though is primarily, we want to
make sure that no matter what kind of services or information or goods, we are making available,
we want to make sure that it’s available to the most possible number of people.
Now, obviously it’s impossible, let’s say that you want to make it available to people who speak
languages other than English. Well, maybe you can translate through a website into Spanish.
Maybe you can translate your brochures to French but the bottom line is there are three thousand
languages spoken around the world. If you want to approach every single person, you will not
have time to accomplish your mission because you will be translating the ‘about us’ page to
3,000 languages. OK?
So, primarily, you need to decide what is that you want to make available and who are the people
or the target groups that you are going to make it available to? Let’s say if its complex
information is pretty hard to understand, the problem are not going to reach out to five or six
year old kids because they won’t be able to grasp all the concepts. So, if to some extent you
want to narrow it down.
The reason why I’m here is to advocate is that if you like to narrow something down, don’t
exclude people with disabilities if otherwise they would be your target audience. What I would
like to talk about today is, ‘How do you involve people with disabilities into what you are doing
and why is the involvement really important?’
You know, there are two things here that people with disabilities can do. One is participating in
Hollywood Rolex and be full part of it. Two, sit at home so some kind of government benefit
obviously from your own tax money because who else is going to pay that and have a pretty
boring meaningless life. So, I guess we don’t really to prove the point here which is more
relevant or which is more useful but let me tell you a story.
When I was born in Hungary, I was born a blind kid and is still blind, still I am today and my
parents were told that it would be pretty embarrassing to take this kid out on the street and later
on, they say, ‘Well, maybe they can and what’s going to happen is when grows up, maybe he can
just watch the geese at the end of the village and he will something to do’ and then my mom
mentioned, ‘No, let’s just forget it. That’s not going to happen because most people can do more
than that. She’ll make sure that this blind kid will be able to do more’; and this is the approach I
would like to take on. This is what I learned from her as soon as I understood what she had done
for me. This is the approach that I want you to embrace—if there’s a way to involve people,
involve them because they’ll be more useful—part of society, they’ll feel much better about
themselves, you’ll feel better and the world will just be a better place. I know I’m sounding a
little idealistic but that’s what the whole thing is really about, that’s what we want to do.
First, I’d like to show you a website on—it’s the disabled world website. It shows some
statistics on disabilities and you can later browse that site or browser on that site, you’ll get more
information. The bottom line is that there are so many people with disabilities. According to

3. some statistics, one out of five people have some kind of disability; according to others, one out
of six. The bottom line is the number’s a lot. You’re talking about why over a billion people
living with their disability of some sort? Many of these people were not born with the disability.
They have acquired it either through hardship, through war or through natural aging process and
when we are talking about disabilities, we mean all these people.
Now, what can we do for these people to be fully integrated? First, what’s important is physical
access. OK, so, usually throughout our days, we’re going places, we go to work, we go
shopping, we go out for a lunch; we go watch a movie, so on and so forth. You have to get to all
these places and if those places are not physically accessible, then there will be many people who
won’t be able to get to these places. If you have stabs, people with wheelchairs will not be able
to access that—that environment. If it’s very hard to get around and you have dangerous
obstacles, people would--vision will have a very difficult time to access the environment. If you
need to rely on certain sounds, people with hearing impairment will have very hard time to
access the environment. For example, when you’re travelling on the bus and the bus station is
announced, it’s great for those who can hear but those who can’t, let alone if they cannot even
see the bus stops, they need to have other types and source of information so they can get to
where they would like to go.
The other thing and something that I’m going to talk more about is the accessibility of
information. We’re in the information society. We are actually living information overload and
it’s working that we need to feel to ride the information but we don’t want anybody to filter this
information out for us. We would like to make sure that all information that’s out there is
accessible and we can select what is the information that we would like to consume and what is
that we would like to disregard and that has to do with the whole lot. It has to do primarily with
websites, with mobile phones, with restaurant menus, with brochures, informational materials
distributed around town, information about the election that’s pretty active these days and so on
and so forth, any information that can be consumed through vision, hearing or touch and there is
quite a bit of that. The other thing is that now I talk about the fact that it’s a great thing to do to
make the environment and information accessible to people with disabilities but it’s also the law,
at least here in the United States and you like it or not, you got to do it. So, once you got to do it,
do it well and make sure it benefits everybody. We’re going to show another website. It’s the
[unclear 12:05]. This is the website that explains what kind of legislation the United States
government has to make our information available to people with disabilities.
OK then. Let me talk to you with the something really interesting. It’s about how people with
disabilities access information. There’s a website, we’re going to show you. It’s just a list of
articles that I thought is pretty interesting to read but explains people with what kinds of different
disabilities and…
First I want to tell you about people without sight. People who are totally blind or don’t really
have useful vision use the computer with the screen reader. I’m going to show you later on but
for now, let’s just say that those are an application called the screen reader. In a simple trials,
these application reads everything that comes on the screen and that reads everything that you
type into the computer and when it comes to touch screens that you will see where the phone
begins and then you have little visual people who are generally attend to use how to contrasts or

4. they use modification software and they consume in certain areas of the stream and they can—
better way to read it.
Again, with the small devices that becomes pretty tricky, when the device is so small that [unclear
13:57] one letter come on fit that entire device that magnified to extend for me to see it, usually this type
of people also use Braille which is essentially way of writing with raised dots on a paper. You cannot see
it right now but when sitting in front of the computer I have a couple sheets of paper in front of me with
my outline with raised dots and with Braille that I’m reading.
And then you have people without hearing. That’s again a very interesting story deliberating an
interesting story there’s a whole lot of technologies and talk about. Primarily, information that you really
make to hear in your life is there is a good number of videos, phone conversations--conversations in
general, just among people that they a hard in participating in regular ways so people would hear your
language much more on reading information. Some people are able to read your lips. Other people are
using sign language interpreters. Other people are communicating much more in writing. Now, when it
gets tricky and somebody gets that point can’t see can’t hear always been happen now and then. There is
an equipment which help you to communicate information through a computer or mobile phone into a
device that’s Braille display that they can read your fingers.
So essentially, when you type something in computer and that way you can communicate information
back and forth, there’s information--there’s a kind of devices allow of transmitting information for that
blind people.
So, what does the bottom line is that these days, even though it’s difficult or may be expensive but there
is technology to involve people disabilities. There are some other kinds of interesting disabilities: people
who cannot use their hands or any body parts. They have more specialized solutions based on which
body parts can use either legs or part of their legs, just their faces o one hand-one finger so on and so
forth. I did not say that even though this disabilities are categorized to 4, 5, 6 different categories
depending on how you look at it. Essentially, disabilities coming all kinds of forms and everybody –what
their disability has their own individual disabilities customized to themselves, so, they need different
accommodations.
For now, I would like to show you an interesting video about what happens when people cannot use their
hands and how can we communicate with the computer using their mouth?
I’m Jim Mildred[sp] with Adaptive Control Technologies and I am going to describe the lip syncs you
can puff most. It’s a USB device. Just plug it in to the back of the computer and you the standard mouse
drivers in your computer. Using these device, use your mouth control the cursor. If I apply pressure to
the cursor move to the left, the cursor moves to the left. Just like the joystick. If I want up and down it
apply pressure upward down, the user can use connect movement to control the cursor or only can use the
lips or they can use only the tongue.
The clicks are done by sniffing and puffing. So if I want to perform the left click. I’ll I blow into the
mouthpiece into the mouth piece. The left click is indicated also the illumination of LED. Left click will
light green. The right click will light red. Right click is performed by stiffing and that’s how will use the
lip syncs that have popped most.
So, this is something really fascinating. In [unclear 19:05] bring a very extreme examples but recently, I
read something that a software and a hardware package was double load so that people can tweet using
their brain waves. You don’t have to touch anything. They just need to concentrate on the letters that

5. show off the screen and they are able to activate those letters and tweet that way. So technology is really
fascinating these days and [unintelligible 19:42] that I would be aware of.
Now, here is the news for you, these technology is not necessarily just were for those who were born with
disabilities. This is not necessarily just for those who acquire their disability and now they do have the
disability. The chances are that you might--you personally might be one out of five people, sometime in
your life, will end up using one of these tools. The reason why I was saying this is because its one thing
that you care for people who have disabilities but if you make information and services and environment
accessible today, it may be something benefits for you tomorrow. So never lose sight of that that you
may be the beneficiary of what you do today or your love ones.
I would like to show you a couple of other videos when will be about how a blind people can recognize
that something interesting technology.
Woman in video:
1 dollar, 2 dollars, 5 dollars, 10$, 20$, 50$, 100$, 5euro, 10euro, 20euro, 50euro, 100euro, 200euro,
500 euro, 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 50 pounds, 100 $, 100 $, 100 $, 100 $, 100 $.
So I have the same two in my own pocket. I don’t where this money could demonstrate worth on m
pocket usually. I was actually working this company to translate this very software into Hungarian
recently. So, yeah, it’s fascinating. Before that, it was an option for me to know unless I folded the
money in a certain way and now people can just give me any information in a very fine [unclear 22:46]. I
would like to make it sure that I hardly ever happen with me in my life that I get cheated because I
didn’t—I wasn’t able to see the money in my hands.
A couple of more videos, I would like to show you how a blind people use a touch screen, one people use
i-phone to recognize money. How to use the i-phone and after that I am going to show you on how to use
the screen reader. The faster could be the i-phone?
Man in a demo:
i-phone 3G’s include the screen reader for visually impaired called voice over. It can speak the
description of the item handled in your finger so you can easily navigate to various apps and other
functions by simply dragging your finger around the screen.
Woman in a demo:
MESSAGES - 2 items: YouTube, stocks, notes, letter.
Man in a demo:
You’ll hear a click when you move the items.
Woman in a demo:
Fast, stocks, setting, voice, mode, stocks
Man in a demo:
You can also click left or right in one finger to move sequentially through all of the item on the screen. A
sound effect will let you know to drop into the next line.
Woman in a demo:
Mails, weather, voice memos, weather, mails, stocks

6. Man in a demo:
A voice over cursor provides visual indication of the item being described. As you add new apps,
additional home screens are created as needed. Tap three fingers to hear how many home screen there are
and which one you’re on.
Woman in a demo:
Page 103.
Man in a demo:
Click 3 fingers to the left or right to move between the home screens.
Woman in a demo:
Page 203. Page 303, USA Today
Man in a demo:
You can press the concave home button on the front of the i-phone to return to the main home screen
anytime.
Woman in a demo:
Stocks
Man in a demo:
--To open an app like the weather application, drag your finger or flick to the right until you hear--
weather
Woman in a demo:
Notes, weather
Man in a demo:
Then double tap on the screen to open it.
Woman in a demo:
Weather – New York, 188 Fahrenheit, 188 Fahrenheit.
Man in a demo:
To get more information flip to the right.
Woman in a demo:
Currently partly cloudy. Currently 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
Man in a demo:
When you’re done press the home button to go back to their home screen.
Woman in a demo:
Home.
Man in a demo:
You can also use voice over from email. When you touch the mail app, you’ll hear after a messages
waiting for you.

7. Woman in a demo:
Mail, 9 new items
Man in a demo:
Double tap anywhere on the screen to open it.
Woman in a demo:
Mail. Mailboxes, button.
Man in a demo:
Click to the right or drag your finger to hear the rest of messages.
Woman in a demo:
Red. Cherry Parker. Shared File. [unclear 25:58] Emily Parker. Our trip to Southern Europe
Man in a demo:
Double tap anywhere on the screen to open the selected the message.
Woman in a demo:
Read. Inbox. Aide, Button, our trip to Southern Europe.
Man in a demo:
Then flip down using two fingers to read it.
Woman in a demo:
Our trip to Southern Europe. July 15, 2000, 9:54pm. Hi everyone. It’s time to plan our next trip
together. We discussed to going to Southern Europe.
Man in a demo:
Tap two fingers to pause. Across the bottom of the screen are additional mail options.
Woman in a demo:
[unclear 26:33]
Man in a demo:
Flip to the right to hear other options.
Woman in a demo:
Delete. He got it. Compose.
Man in a demo:
Use ‘compose’ to write a new message. Too reply or forward a message, select the reply button then
double tap.
Woman in a demo:
Reply. Reply it button – reply, reply button.
Man in a demo:
Drag your finger down the West to select an option.

8. Woman in a demo:
Reply, reply, reply all button, forward button, cancel button, reply button.
Man in a demo:
Then double tap.
Woman in a demo:
Reply – send from my i-phone on July 13, 2009 at 4:54 PM.
Man in a demo:
To type, hold down one thumb and slide to select the button you want then tap another thumb to type it.
Woman in a demo:
Capital <S – O – U – N – D – S> space <SOUNDS> [intelligible 27:27] More numbers, exclamation
mark. Great.
Man in a demo:
When you’re done, select SEND then double tap the screen.
Woman in a demo:
SEND selected, inbox aid button
Man in a demo:
When you‘re finished with your mail. Press--
Tom Babinszki:
So this is a again fascinating and with this technology we are able to do so many things in the i-phone and
I didn’t even get to show you most of the things. We can now use the GPS. We can make conversation
and everything that you could do the difference is that, there are so many things that we are not able to do
before. I always told people that since I got my i-phone and half as blind that used to be and this is not
over exaggeration and I became so much more independent since I’ve got this technology. But let’s see
how people more traditional device that is a computer with a screen reader.
Demo1:
This is the home page of a handbook for the educators and the museums on the RPS on Sight website.
Listen to how a blind person with a just screen reader with experience some of these page.
Demo2:
Handbook Graphic. When graphic programming and made A – Z, graphic photo for teacher and students
and [unintelligible 29:05]; graphics [unclear 29:06] higher process. This page when graphic accessibility
towards training. This page when graphics photo of and exploring [unclear 29:15]--1907;graphic making
programs and facility accessible; graphic for educators at museum. This page when graphics of disability
awareness training. This page when graphics photo [unclear 29:30]; this page went graphic human
resources. This page went graphic further on hands-on computer, graphic employment in museums
[unclear 29:45] in creating accessible programming for people with visual impairments; graphic [unclear
29:52] by a young woman in modern art, New York.

9. Tom Babinszki:
And so on and so forth but I think you got the idea. It can be speeded up and slowed down and also the
quality is much more better while its stream in the air and it is also a better quality. Speech systems are
better these days. But there is one thing that I would like to talk to you about and that it is the availability
of this technology.
The last screen readers that you have heard costs a lot over a thousand dollars. The screen readers that you heard on
the i-phone is built in to the system and ships together with the i-phone. There is a major difference between a
specialized tools and mainstream tools that are accessible to people with disabilities and the specialized tools are
extremely expensive and the reason being is because less people buy it and producing them is much more expensive.
You cannot just say simply okay this is for people with disabilities and want it and the population has it because they
are open with this disabilities. For example the world display that I was talking about that transmits information
from the computer to Braille can cost from $2,000 to $10,000 dollars and the good medium range with the [unclear
31:35] 6,000 dollars.
Just a nice system for blind person can be up to $10 thousand so when you have solutions that are usable for
everybody then all of the sudden is much cheaper . Why you have an i-phone that is able to control caption videos
and you provide videos caption. All of sudden a hearing impaired person doesn’t need to hire somebody for
[unclear 32:16] for 50 to 100 dollars per hour to read information to them or just taking information to them.
When you make sure that a laptop that you saw in the store is easy tool that with one hand or to use with a couple of
fingers and all of a sudden so many people will be able to use them and operate it compared to DOS or laptops
which needed two hands and at least four strong fingers. That is the difference and this is why it’s so important that
a mainstream technologies are available to everybody or if not, then they can be Tweet to be available to most
people. I give you an example, when you cannot differentiate between buttons of the microwave or either because
you can’t feel them or can’t locate which button is which. You can always leave them but when you have to work
with touch screen [noise 33:18] or the system: there are speech available or text magnification or the sudden that
information will be not be available to the mainstream user. So let me stop here and see if you have any questions
and there’s still one more topic area that I would like to talk about.
(Question and Answer)
[Host: Woman] Oh! Great chance! We just got a question from Cecile and she would like to know “How can we
technically adopt a website to be accessible?” That’s a very good question.
Tom Babenski: Yes excellent. I’m actually going to talk about that--some later on. The bottom line is that there is a
whole lot that you can do with your website. If you just pick one or two the things incorporate that, and all of the
sudden your website will be more much available, let me cover this just a bit later with a more detail.
[Host: Woman] OK, great. Thank you. Oh! We have another question here from Jane. She asks, “The application
for the i-phone is in English. Is this app also available with other languages?”
Tom Babenski: Yes it is. Currently and approximately, more than 20 other languages.
[Host: Woman]: OK. That is good to know and I don’t have any other questions at this time.
Tom Babenski: OK, let’s do a little bit of organization assessment. It is now about the theory we are concern
about, but what does our organization look on a daily basis? When you walk onto your organization? Can
you going with a wheelchair? Can you go with a stroller? Do you need to go on a step on large steps that

10. cross anything to my shoulder or is it just easy to roll in there? If not--do you have an alternative ways of
opening your organization? Is there an elevator which is to ride them off for a wheelchair to roll in? Is
there a restroom that our users can use? I think that’s at an ecological height with the wheelchair. Sitting
in the wheelchair, can people reach the light switches. Actually, [unclear 36:17]website is the website that
spells out—this is the American disabilities act—or the specifications and this is quite an information and
I will not go through all that. I just want to touch the main points.
So, once you’re getting on your building, what kind of devices do you use? When the phone is ringing is
that only indication the phone is ringing or does have any lights so that they can come here or would
know that the phone is ringing? Do you have specialized full alarm system or do I need to able to hear
what they are saying in the other end of the line? Is the phoneless operator equipped to work with people
to hearing impairments? If you have any emergencies, how do you announce these emergency? It’s an
auditory or do we have any signs or application that you connect to peoples computer to alert them that
there is an emergency?
How do you communicate with people? Obviously is sending out regular mail or even in pick up your
brochures. What happens if somebody cannot read this information? And here might be talking about
people who can’t see it but if they have any other reading disabilities, can they obtained this information
in other format such as electronically so that the speech system [audio cut 38:18] can read it to them. Can
be receive a recorded format and can be receive braille equivalent.
Now I understand stuff wasting get high pricey and may be all organization doesn’t have plenty of money
but it’s always a great idea to come up with an alternative solution and provide this information at least
upon request in some kind of format that people can use. You don’t need to provide everything for that
matter. It’s also a key if you don’t turn alternatives but somebody needs something when you are open to
meeting their needs and making sure that they can access our organization and they can open up
information.
The other thing that I would like to talk about is the websites. Websites can be very interesting even
though theoretically, it’s not too difficult to make website accessible. The reality is that it causes so many
problems to people with disabilities. Just recently with those social media sites, for example, where you
think, OK, this would open up the world and people can easily communicate, not exactly because some of
the things pretty difficult to access. Maybe you have seen solutions where in order for you to register,
you put a user name, specify the password and then there’s a couple words on the screen with a pretty bad
font; very hard to read. You need to type those letters in order to aster application. Well, the problem is
the screen reader will not be able to use that information. So, personally, I need sight to the systems to
type those words in. Now, some companies also started using an audio challenge but it’s going to help
hearing impaired people especially if they having reading disabilities.
The other thing is that many things work very well with the mouse but if you’re not able to use the
mouse, what happens then? Is that website fully accessible and it’s again, not talking about blind people
but anybody with any [unclear 41:18] related disabilities where it’s easier for them to use the keyboard or
even though, they can’t use the keyboard, they can use the voice recognition system and give commands
to the computer and interpret it as keyboard commands.

11. So, a couple of thing that you can do to make sure that your website is accessible, next time that you look
at your website through your product, try to think about using the keyboard and I would tell you don’t
touch the mouse but when we do this exercise and the different trainings I’m doing, all the time I hear
people just automatically reach towards their mouse. So unplug your mouse if you are irregular traditional
computer and use everything with the keyboard. Can you access all the functionality? If you can, then
your down your website is already in a much better shape than the average website.
If there are pictures and images on your website which are helpful to understand the content and I am not
talking about decorative images and not even about your logo. But if you are using charts, if you are using
maps and if you are using directions, do they have alternatives? Normally, when your website is
developed in an accessible way, if you take your mouse over a different images and if it has a different
alternative task is going to pop up. If you have that, screen readers will be able to read that information.
Are you using videos? Are you using audio materials? If you do, do you have equivalent information? Do
you provide captioning or transcripts for your audio video materials? Because if you do, then hearing
impaired people will be able to equal participate in consuming your content. These are the most
important and most frequently encountered issues. So, let’s just review this one more time. If you can
access everything with the keyboard, if you have text equivalent for images and charts and graphs and if
you have text equivalent of audios and videos than you care so many issues that may come up on your
website and you just made it possible with so many people get to your content and it’s really important
because probably you’re competing with different organizations and if we are talking about 20% of the
population which is quite a bit to say whether they are going to be your clients or the people that you
serving or somebody else and you know, it’s even worse when you’re not competing and you’re serving
your audience because some people cannot access your services, they won’t be able to know that you are
out there willing to help them.
There so much more we can say about web accessibility. But I’d like to leave it there. There is another
website the www.3c.org site has an accessibility page. This is the worldwide consortium. There also
many things. They are putting together guidelines for web accessibility. For the first site they seem to be
pretty complex and overwhelming. The bottom line is there’s a couple of website that’s really great
internationally recognized for the records of accessibility. So, with that, let me see if you have any
questions either about web accessibility or anything else that we have discussed today.
Woman Host:
We did received one question from Nathan who asks, “Do you suggest “text to speak generators” for the
website or should they’d be naturally narrated?
Tom Babinszki:
I definitely don’t recommend that you have done any text to speech to websites and the reason of doing is
because if people need text to speech to use the letter on the computer or they have their own devices and
they would usually prefer to use the one that they are using for everything else and not have different ones
for different website. You can see on certain website that there’s a ‘read’ button and for some people can
be convenient in Adobe Reader, for example. There’s an option to read the content. It’s says, “read out
loud” option. Certainly, there’s difficulty but it’s OK. It’s optional. I would not force it on the user and to
be honest to you, you don’t need it. People will find a way to get the information in the website.

12. Woman Host:
Great! We have few more questions.
Cecille asks again. “If we do realized that website doesn’t match the requirements you just talk about.
What can we do? How do they fix it?”
Tom Babinszki:
Great question!
First of all, you can either talk to a development team. If you don’t have one, you can talk to that person
or the company who develops your website and see if they know about accessibility and if they do and
you can read the website and implement those accessible features. If not, there are companies with
specialized in accessibility consulting so you can call those company and ask them to review your
website and give your ideas on what needs to be changed to make the website truly accessible and usually
those company give you report and details on necessary changes or suggestive changes and will go back
to web developer and make changes with yourself and may be the company do some second testing with
your website, making sure that your website are changes done properly.
I don’t recommend hiring a company to do the changes especially if there too much mistake to be done
that it you cost more to train the new team in getting to work on.
Woman Host:
Ok! We have couple of questions for you. Cecille also asks, “How can you make a PDF or other
downloadable brochure accessible?”
Man Host:
This is an excellent question and if you only have a PDF document you can still make it accessible with
the Adobe Acrobat but that’s the most difficult part. What I would recommend you do is go back to your
source document in which originally added in your brochure and try to make sure that that it is accessible
especially if you have images make it sure that it is contain readable information. Make sure that your
documents are easily readable and done converted into PDFs. PDFs in general are pretty hard to make
fully accessible. I couldn’t lie about it that, that’s the major problems in areas. Adobe just came up with a
new version of Adobe Acrobat and that has even more accessibility features but it’s definitely not
supposed to do the more you can do source of document, the better result you to make in the pack.
Woman Host:
Great! Thank you! We have one last question from Jane. She asks, “If you anticipate an impact of the i-
pod similar to the i-phone?
Man Host:
Yes, absolutely! It actually does have huge impact in the life of people with disabilities. The i-pad comes
to work much better for people with a low vision and the i-phone comes to work much work better with--
for people who are totally blind because they don’t need a large as long as there is a screen they were
doing great and the low vision can use a pretty good modifications but there’s another way of using it.
People who are original will not able to make a presentation and speak in the audiences are now
increasing our devices to type their presentations and with the voice reader that I described earlier, they
can read their presentation into microphone so they don’t even need to be able to speak to have their
presentation spoken. It much more difficult several years ago, when speech systems were dis-
understandable and it took some kind of learning curve to get used to a speech system. Also, i-pods are
getting more and more speech impairment for communicating information especially with people who
have a speech impairment, hearing impairment or difficult in using their hands. So, yes definitely i-pod is
extremely use compensate with some disabilities.

13. Woman Host:
That is explains that he has seen the ipod user used sign language to communicate with others from his
library. That’s very interesting!
Man Host:
Yes, I haven’t really heard about it. I didn’t thought about it. But now what you say, yes it does make
sense. You and I can use of Face time, you can use another video chat application and you can use the
sign language of the video chat up applications. It is really did limitless the creativity of people. Now,
there’s what they can use the devices for.
Woman Host:
Ok!
And I am. Yes we don’t have any more questions and I know that we have only have a couple minutes
left.
Woman :
Indeed. Thank you. So, I’d like to close out here. I want to thank you so much, Tom, for doing it and let’s
pause and thanks to all you for joining us today. Please keep an eye on all of those things and join us
again soon and we would be appreciated if you would completely the evaluation is going pop up to see
you the webinars. With that, again I want thank you all for coming and enjoy the rest of your day!
End of 53:45 minute transcript