Disability and ipadio

One of the great challenges in this new millennium is addressing issue of disablism. Many of you won’t have seen or heard of such a thing – but extraordinarily, disabled people are 4 times more likely to be violently assaulted than non-disabled people.

ipadio can help to bridge some of these gaps by giving voice – quite literally - to disabled people and allowing them to broadcast their experiences directly from their own homes. This might be via ipadio’s radio offering or it might be news and reviews from disabled people to disabled people.

One really good example would be for those offering services to blind users to make their information available directly via an audio broadcast. ipadio is not just about live streaming – once a stream has been recorded ipadio keeps an archive of that broadcast as an MP3 which could be downloaded as a podcast. Let’s say a really good coffee making machine has been launched but the instructions are not available as Braille or as a recording – it only takes few minutes to read those instructions out and thousands of users suddenly have what they need for the ideal espresso!

You can listen to this in action by peaking at the Phlog of a partially sighted technologist - Roger Wilson-Hinds on this link.

Accessible Players

In addition to offering visual-impairment friendly recording (phonecalls and voice prompts when you dial in), we also offer playback tools that are compatible with screen-readers (software used by many blind users to navigate on a computer). Perhaps the best example of this so far is our work with Vision 2020 UK broadcasting their conference live online, in June 2010. Visitors to the Vision 2020 UK website were able to listen live in an accessible player to the proceedings - even if they could not get there in person - which included a keynote speech by former Home Secretary David Blunkett.