ASB honors Apple’s accessibility work with Louis Braille Award
- jan
- 28
The Louis Braille Award Ceremony honors people and organizations that make significant contributions to the blind and visually impaired, and to those in the community who have made outstanding achievements and inspired others. This year, that includes Apple. From ASB.org:
Apple believes technology should be accessible to everyone. Intuitive by design, Macs, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple Watch and Apple TV come with accessibility features built right in, making them powerful and affordable assistive devices. Apple built the world's first full featured screen reader directly into an operating system in the Mac, made the first touchscreen accessible with iPhone, and delivered the first accessible consumer wearable with Apple Watch - all built to be set-up out-of-the box without sighted assistance. Apple also supports braille across Mac and iOS devices with braille tables for more than 25 languages and plug-and-play connectivity for over 70 models of refreshable braille displays.
Thank you @ASBPhiladelphia for honoring Apple with the Louis Braille Award. Proud of our team's dedication to #accessibility. pic.twitter.com/mnAGD8EUH5
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) January 27, 2017
Accessibility is one of the areas where Apple doesn't care about the "damn ROI" and does what they feel is right. From the top down they take tremendous pride in making technology truly accessible to everyone and their accessibility team — composed of many engineers from the accessibility community — is outstanding.
It's now taken almost for granted that when a new Apple product ships it'll ship with VoiceOver and other accessibility features built-in from day one. And that new features, like wheelchair workouts will be added to existing products.
Thank you to everyone involved. Keep it up and can't wait to see what's next!