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These are my notes, which I wrote while attending the BBC’s “Tuesday 18th May: Vision” event to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day (which is Thursday 20th May). There were a range of speakers in the 1-hour session. The BBC are running sessions all week, so it’s worth signing up for the others!

Talk by Molly Watt, founder of Molly Watt Trust:

• Molly was born deaf. She had a good speaking voice and could lip read, so not many people even realised. In her teens, her vision started to deteriorate, and Molly was formally diagnosed with Usher Syndrome.
• From the age of 3, Molly had analogue hearing aids, which were replaced with digital at the age of 9; Molly remembers hearing birds singing for the first time. Later on she was given a ‘smart’ hearing aid, where the quality of sound improved even further, and came with surround sound – essential for someone who is blind as well as deaf. It also has a smartphone app, where Molly can change the bass/treble/background noise levels.
• Molly has an iPhone, which comes with lots of assistive technology built in. It has two screen readers – VoiceOver and SpeakScreen – and Molly uses mostly the latter. Molly also uses colour filters, rather than dark mode, to place a tint on the screen and reduce the glare. Finally, she uses Siri to send messages, meaning she doesn’t need to physically get her phone out in public. Molly now feels ready to move out of the family home, even during COVID, and says this is all down to technology.
• Molly went to university but couldn’t access the intranet, due to its inaccessibility. She fought for change, but couldn’t get the university to make any changes, so left the uni in order to educate on a larger stage.
• The Molly Watt Trust was founded to raise awareness of Usher Syndrome, and for people with Usher Syndrome to meet one another and boost morale and give the tech/tools needed to get by.

Talk by Natalie Curran, Assistive Technology Tester at BBC:

• There has been a lot of movement on equality over the past few years, but disability equality seems to have been left behind.
• Natalie has been an ATT for 8 months, and says she is still learning lots. She is looking forward to going into the office, where she’ll be able to use assistive technologies she hasn’t used before, such as ZoomText.
• Natalie wants to help “bridge the gap”, saying “if only one person walks away and next time they [build] something, they think twice about [how to do it accessibly], then I’ve done my job”.

Talk by TV Platform Accessibility Guild at BBC:

• Watched a presentation – ‘Screen Readers on TV’ – presented by “BBC Synthetic Voice”, which sounded very human. It’s challenging to build TV apps – older ‘smart’ TVs often don’t support new technology. The average person keeps their TV for 7-8 years – the equivalent of web developers having to support iPhone 5 today.
• BBC Sounds was designed with basic screen reader support from the start, as it’s a relatively new app, but iPlayer has been slower going. It was, until recently, silent when using a screen reader, but new changes available in beta introduce support in some pages (though not all pages, notably the the sign-in screens).
• The BBC are working with TV manufacturers, writing & providing automated tests to them so that they can identify issues prior to the device being released. The BBC are hoping this will improve the experience for ALL applications on the device, not just iPlayer.

Panel: Paul Smyth MBE of Barclays Accessibility, Robin Christopherson MBE of AbilityNet, Adi Latif of AbilityNet, Emma Tracey of BBC Journalism, and Sean Dilley of BBC News:

• It was 2009 when Sean had his first accessible phone – the iPhone – which “opened up the world” to him. Prior to that he had some Nokia phones that spoke to him but weren’t particularly useful.
• [What do you use for work every day?]
  • Paul uses ZoomText to avoid eye strain, and to reduce the reliance on (and noise of) his screen reader.
  • Robin uses a Bluetooth headset, joining with audio only, listening to the meeting but also having other earphones for their computer so that he can multitask.
  • Emma uses a Perkins Brailler – a metal braille typewriter for labelling her kids’ books, kitchen spices etc.
  • Adi loves his PenFriend – a pen shaped device to record voice notes associated with labels you can stick to things, such as food in the kitchen, and then wave the pen over it to play the voice note. It allows him to easily identify spices etc.
  • Sean has a barcode scanner app on his iPhone to tell him what tins he’s looking at, and also apps where he can ask a person what’s in front of the camera, which is very useful sometimes.

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