For this post I watched the talk with Charlie Watson from the UVic Centre for Accessible Learning. Something that stuck out to me in Watson’s talk was that “ability is often temporary. The truth is that most of us will experience changes at some point as we get older, such as sight, hearing, and mobility. When thinking about this, I connected it to my grandmother. I’m very close with her, and I have first hand seen how important “assistive technology” really is. She wears hearing aids, and without them we can’t have a proper conversation. On her computer, I have adjusted the settings so she can properly see everything. Her phone is set to “simple mode” with only 3 big apps. To me these were all quick fixes I could do for my grandma. But after watching this video by Watson I realized these fixes are actually called digital accessibility. 

The video discusses the “POAR” framework, to make things perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. My grandma’s hearing aids are a great example of this as they are a device that makes the world perceivable for her. 

Technology creators have a responsibility in this too, in the digital world this would include:

• Captions and transcripts: captions allow people to “hear” the video
• Proper headings: instead of just making text bigger, actually using proper headings
• Descriptive links: instead of just a “click here”

My main takeaway from this video was that I should try to make things more accessible TO ALL when posting digitally.  In the past I haven’t been very aware of digital accessibility issues because i dont have any, which is a bit selfish. This video has made me reflect on this and I’m going to try from now on to change. 

An example of this could be posting an image with a description of it, so that blind people could also get to understand the image. I’ve used AI and prompted it to “describe this picture for a blind person” below;

This scene captures a peaceful, overcast day at a beach lined with charming colourful cabins. On the left, two small wooden huts—one pale mint green and one deep teal—sit on the sand, featuring white-trimmed windows and a small deck with a picnic table. A narrow, paved path runs alongside them, where a family of three is walking away from the camera toward the distant ocean; a man carries a small child while a woman beside him pushes a stroller. The horizon opens up to a calm, blue-gray sea under a soft, white sky, creating a quiet and leisurely atmosphere.