


People with disabilities, Petrick argues, are paradigmatic computer users, demonstrating the personal computer's potential to augment human abilities and provide for new forms of social, professional, and political participation.
#Accessible computers software
Motivated by user feedback and prompted by legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, which offered the promise of equal rights via technological accommodation, companies developed sophisticated computerized devices and software to bridge the accessibility gap. Petrick tells the compelling story of how computer engineers and corporations gradually became aware of the need to make computers accessible for all people. In Making Computers Accessible, Elizabeth R. This type of innovation demonstrated the possibilities of computers to dramatically improve the lives of people living with disabilities. Inspired by this chance meeting, Kurzweil decided that he must put his new innovation to work to "overcome this principal handicap of blindness." By 1976, he had built a working prototype, which he dubbed the Kurzweil Reading Machine. The blind man expressed interest: One of the frustrating obstacles that blind people grappled with, he said, was that no computer program could translate text into speech. The letter must include the student’s name, age, grade, school name, school address and school phone number. Kurzweil explained that he was searching for a use for his new software. First, you will need to write a letter requesting a free computer. In 1974, not long after developing the first universal optical character recognition technology, Raymond Kurzweil struck up a conversation with a blind man on a flight.
