Why accessibility is important: watch a blind guy use Instagram
This is a great video, which shows Tommy Edison—who is blind—using Instagram. If nothing else, this highlights the importance of accessibility in modern technology, and the way it can make tasks more inclusive. Roll back 20 or 30 years and someone like Edison would have found it significantly harder to take the shots and would also have had no worldwide outlet. Today, with an iPhone, he can capture and share his surroundings, despite not being able to see them himself.
Apple talks about its devices being ‘magical’, and that’s mostly marketing guff, but in this kind of case, I think it’s a justifiable term. You can follow Edison here, and if you’re an iOS developer whose app isn’t fully accessible, I hope this might give you some inspiration and lead you to making your app available to all users.
Further reading: developer Matt Gemmell’s iOS accessibility articles.
This has been doing the rounds for a while now but it seems like Instagram didn’t actually made much of an effort in making their app accessible to blind people after all. Joe Clark provides a good rebuttal: http://blog.fawny.org/2012/12/17/vo-camera/
I agree it’s important and as easy as never before to make apps accessible. Developers just have to want it.