Imagine you had the chance to know one month in advance, that you will lose your vision completely. Now, take three minutes to think and/or write down what you would need and how you would prepare yourself in order to continue with your life and daily tasks as you usually did.
At least 2,2 billion people have partly or completely lost their vision with serious consequences in all aspects of their life. Vision, as one of the most dominant of our senses, has a crucial role in every facet and phase of our lives. Alongside with the physical challenges, people with visual disabilities face stigma and misunderstanding of their health status which also relates to the psychological effects of the disease and overall mental health.
According to the United Nations definition, accessibility refers to “the provision of flexibility to accommodate each user’s needs and preferences; when used with reference to persons with disabilities, any place, space, item or service, whether physical or virtual, that is easily approached, reached, entered, exited, interacted with, understood or otherwise used by persons of varying disabilities, is determined to be accessible.”
From the computer’s science point of view, accessibility is an action, which makes a website reachable and usable by as many people as possible.
Nowadays, technology expands with rapid speed and has become an inevitable part of daily life. To access not only in the virtual world, but also on a very often occasion, in the real one, one needs an accessible device which offers an accessible space. Can one order a taxi? Withdraw money? Shop online? Accessibility is therefore determined not only by how well a certain digital content complies with standards and regulations for usability, but foremost through the usage itself. Accessibility reaches its final phase of testing only when the final user tests the content. It is therefore a process of co-creation and co-production, where the person with visual disability is the quality analyst himself.
For those of us, who are engaged in practices which can make a difference, we can ask ourselves what is our cross-factorial strategy to facilitate and ensure accessibility? And this line of thinking is not about replacing vision, but enhancing it with assistive technology.
Let’s go back to our first paragraph. Every point you’ve written down or thought about is part of the things you already have access to and you cannot allow to not have anymore. Your action plan is constructed around pivotal areas in your life, both personal and professional.
Accessibility has a central role in our lives and reflects directly on our individual and collective social functioning. Focusing on the need for accessibility now will reflect immediately on the near future.
