by Ben Kempner, Program Director, Accessibility Solution Management and Marketing
August 23, 2005
IBM hired the first employee with a disability nearly a century ago, in 1914. Since then, IBM has maintained a strong commitment to hiring the best candidate for the job, regardless of age or physical abilities, and to supporting all employees to help them reach their maximum potential at work.
As part of that commitment, IBM scientists, engineers, and developers have embraced the idea of "innovation that matters" to individuals, business, and society. The most promising of those inventions have moved from the laboratory to alphaWorks, where developers and users, including people with disabilities, test the technologies and give valuable feedback. New emerging technologies making their first appearance on alphaWorks include the Keyboard Optimizer and the Head Tracking Pointer.
From there, developers move the technologies into commercial assets and products that are now available to disabled and older workers though IBM solutions. Recent examples of accessibility technologies now available to customers include Mouse Smoothing Software, which helps people with hand tremors use a mouse; Home Page Reader, which reads the content of Web pages aloud -- in a choice of languages -- for blind users; Easy Web Browsing, which helps seniors adjust the color, contrast, and font size of information on their computer screens; and Web Adaptation Technology (available in eight languages), which allows individuals to make adjustments to the way Web pages are presented and the way information is entered with the keyboard.
IBM is an industry leader in its commitment to make its own products accessible, in its active participation with advocacy groups for the disabled, and in its promotion of uniform or “harmonized” accessibility standards around the world.
Next, accessible technologies originally designed for the disabled will be applied to aid the aging workforce. As the world's population grows older and workers stay on the job well past traditional retirement age, the maturing labor force needs accessible information technology to stay productive. IBM is there.
After that, who knows? There are few limits to innovation. As Paul Horn, IBM senior vice-president of Research, says, "I think that out of our work making computing easier to use for people with disabilities, we will think of radically new approaches. Out of these approaches we will find not just ways of helping people with disabilities, but ways of making computing far more natural and intuitive."
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