David,
This one also came through just fine.
Christina
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-philly-comp-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-philly-comp-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Goldfield
Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2016 11:45 AM
To: Philadelphia Computer Users Group for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Subject: [blind-philly-comp] Is This Blank? Article from CNET About Comcast
Products for People with Disabilities
The following article appeared this past week on Cnet.
cnet.com
This Comcast exec turns accessible tech into something for all Joan E. Solsman
tech-enabled.jpg This is part of CNET's "Tech Enabled" series about the role
technology plays in helping the disability community.
Tom Wlodkowski is working hard to put himself out of a job.
Wlodkowski is the head of accessibility at Comcast, having joined four years
ago from AOL. After working 25 years to make technology more inclusive for
people with disabilities, he's aiming for the day when it's just part of the
routine.
"We'll know we're there when you don't need dedicated accessibility groups
anymore," Wlodkowski, who was born blind, said in an interview three weeks ago
in his lab at the towering Comcast skyscraper in Philadelphia. "People are
starting to realize now that...if you really focus on accessible design, you
make a better product for everyone."
tomwlodkowskiportrait.jpg
Tom Wlodkowski, who joined Comcast as its first vice president of accessibility
in 2012, navigates the company's streaming app on his iPhone.
Joan E. Solsman/CNET
A trend stretching back centuries, tools built for accessibility underpin tech
essential to your daily life. Whether you lean on the closed-caption subtitles
on your Facebook News Feed's videos or voice-command powers baked into today's
phones and speakers, features that help with disabilities cure headaches for
the masses too. It's the crux of inclusive design, a concept Wlodkowski and his
team at Comcast have promoted inside their own monolithic media company: You
reach more people when you consider and include all of them, and that makes for
stronger business -- and better tech.
Comcast isn't alone in this trend. Both Apple and Microsoft kicked off their
events last week with videos about the importance of designing products to be
more inclusive. There was heightened awareness of the issue in October because
it was National Disability Employment Awareness Month.
Technology has a long track record of breakthroughs aimed at accommodating a
disability that ended up helping everyone else.
Alexander Graham Bell's work on the telephone went hand-in-hand with research
into deafness. The first working typewriter was crafted by Pellegrino Turri so
his blind lover could return his letters. Vint Cerf, a "father of the Internet"
who is hard of hearing, developed early email protocols so he and his deaf wife
could communicate easier.
Casting a wide net
For Wlodkowski, inclusion was baked into his upbringing.
comcast-accessibility-labs.jpg
Wlodkowski and his team team work in an accessibility lab in Comcast's
headquarters.
Comcast
The youngest of four brothers, he jokes that his mother didn't have the
bandwidth to coddle her blind son with a houseful of boys wreaking havoc.
Despite Wlodkowski's wisecracks about his parents setting him loose in the
streets of the Connecticut suburb of Southington, when the time came for him to
ride a bike, his mom found herself fighting back her instinct to protect him,
she told him later.
"We were in a schoolyard in our neighborhood, and I fell off like every kid
does, but I probably attributed it to the fact I couldn't see," he recounted.
When he complained that he wanted to stop, she told him they wouldn't leave
until he got back on the bike, even if they stayed in the schoolyard all night.
"She said it was the hardest thing for her to stay true, because it would have
been easy to say, 'You know what, let's just go walk the bike home and we're
done,' right?" he said. "But that was probably the best thing she could've
done."
Wlodkowski realized early in his career that inclusion meant casting a wide net
to the disability community at large, even those with the same disability as
himself.
He began working in accessibility and tech in the early 1990s at public radio
and TV station WGBH in Boston. The company at the time was developing video
descriptive services for people who have low vision or are blind like him; the
audio descriptions narrate the action of a show during breaks in dialogue.
"When I first got there, I was like, "Well, I'm the consumer. Won't you just
tell me what's on the screen?" he said. He failed to grasp the nuances that
make video description most helpful, he said. A kids' show, for example, needs
to speak relatively, like calling something "as big as a dinner plate" rather
than 12-inches around. Grown-up programming descriptions should be neutral, so
viewers can draw their own conclusions about why a character is, say, standing
silently in the corner.
It taught him a lesson that he has carried through to the present day at
Comcast, where his team holds frequent roundtables to get first-hand accounts
from people with all kinds of disabilities.
"You can put ten of us in a room who are blind, and I might have one way of
doing it, and [another person] might have another," Wlodkowski said.
At Comcast, "it's our job to sift through all of that feedback and reach that
common denominator that at least gives everybody a good jumping off point and a
usable experience."
More than a niche feature
voice-remote-sree-blog-hero.jpg
Wlodkowski's team has enhanced accessibility features into Comcast's pay-TV
service, like a voice remote that responds to spoken commands with the push of
a button.
Comcast
Comcast's voice remote is the company's prime example of how an accessible
technology makes mass-market products better. The remotes have a voice-command
button that lets anyone pull up a program, movie, or channel just by asking.
Since Comcast introduced them to subscribers of its advanced X1 pay-TV service
a year and a half ago, the company has deployed more than 10 million to
customers.
It's tech that sprung from Wlodkowski's team.
For people with a visual disability like him, that kind of control puts
watching television in closer reach. It also allows the people who help care
for someone with a disability -- a spouse, a parent, a roommate -- to do
something else while their loved ones command their couch surfing on their own.
And for the sighted masses, it helps liberates everyone from that design
monstrosity dating back to the dawn of cable TV: the channel grid.
"People may think of this as a niche audience, but there is broader value to
it," he said. More than one in three US households have a member that
identifies with a disability, according to panel research by Nielsen this
month. And a landmark study by Forrester and Microsoft more than a decade ago
found that 60 percent of working-age US adults were likely to benefit from
accessible technology, even if they don't necessarily identify as having what's
commonly categorized as a "disability."
Wlodkowski is starting to see signs that more companies are paying attention.
Yes, his job at Comcast is still intact, but he's noticed attendance explode at
business conferences centered on accessibility in recent years. The number of
attendees at the US Business Leadership Network's annual confab, which focuses
on strategies for including people with disabilities in the workplace, has
spiked 88 percent this year from levels in 2013.
Wlodkowski said his team continues to work on advanced technology, like
eye-gaze tracking that can help people who can move only their pupils to pick
exactly what they want to watch on TV. But he said their meaningful role is
simply helping others at the company realize how little it takes to help so
many.
"It's not like we're doing rocket science over in this lab," he said.
"We're here to connect all the dots."
--
David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology Specialist
Feel free to visit my Web site
WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
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