Descriptive Video is a growing area of digital accessibility where a separate audio channel is provided for video content. This channel describes on-screen content for the benefit of people who have trouble seeing or understanding what they see. Engadget reports in their article below about a new feature in Disney’s app that will allow movie theater goers to pop in their ear buds and listen to a Descriptive audio track provided through Disney’s Movies Anywhere app.

“Disney app will narrate ‘Finding Dory’ for blind theatergoers” by @mariella_moon
https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/17/disney-app-finding-dory-narration/

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The Amazon Kindle, which has been for years the cautionary tale of inaccessible tech, made two notable announcements in the last week.

On March 2nd PR Newswire posted, “National Federation of the Blind and Amazon Join Forces to Improve Accessible Reading Experiences for Blind and Low-Vision Students.” These two organizations have been at odds for a while. Now that they are on the same side, Kindle may be the new tech to watch for accessibility.

Today, less than one week later, the Kindle app for IOS has updated with several accessibility related features including:

• Immersion reading – A reading experience where your Kindle book will highlight each word as the Audible version of the book is played.
• OpenDyslexic font – A font optimized to assist people who have decoding challenges often associated with Dyslexia.

It looks like the Amazon Kindle team has changed tack and is joining Apple and other tech companies in building more inclusive technology.

A Blog article by @davidberman over at Kanbansolutions.com describes how public search engines index websites similar to the way that a person who relies on accessible technology browses your site. Build an accessible site and you will likely see improvements in your search rank.

http://www.kanbansolutions.com/blog/website-accessibility-is-good-seo/#more-1971

@mkramer at www.Poynter.org writes about her experience with a friend that lead her to write guidelines for digital accessibility for journalism products. http://goo.gl/lSy5Do