Research and Innovation
Many of the solutions to benefit people with disabilities have inspired solutions that help us all. This thought comes to mind:
We are the music makers,
excerpt from Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
The speech recognition software behind the artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, like Siri and Alexa, originally came about as assistive technology for people with motor disabilities. It was supposed to help them speak to computers if they could not type.
Many of those devices have no actual monitors or screens to display text. We hear the AI assistants speak the results from our verbal queries instead. Text-to-speech software originally came about as assistive technology for people with visual disabilities.
Yet we all use it.
Please use the information here to help inspire the next great innovation.