Sometimes, when it comes to the long fight to improve visual accessibility that UKAAF members and supporters are engaged in, a little bit of grass roots brilliance can go a long way to keep you optimistic. And the wonderful news I spotted on the BBC’s Newsround channel for younger viewers surely fits that description to a ‘t,’ or maybe a ‘k’: ‘how school children inspired Kellogg’s to change cereal boxes to help the visually impaired.
Specifically, new QR code scanning technology is being added to the food giant’s cereal boxes to help those who are visually impaired find important information, such as ingredients, allergens, and recycling information. Probably well overdue, but we should applaud the company for the move nonetheless, and also praise its team for picking up on the idea from speaking with children at St Vincent’s, a Liverpool sensory impairment school: “Over two million people in the UK live with sight loss and are unable to simply read the information on our cereal boxes, and we believe that everyone should be able to access important and useful information about the food that we sell.”
The move has been praised by UKAAF sponsor RNIB, and another positive development from another UKAAF partner is also coming together. That’s in the shape of a special ‘PDF Days Europe 2021’ 3-day in September being put together by the PDF Association.
Getting together in-person and online to ‘talk PDF’
The conference, kicking off on the 27th, features two in-person Technical days in Berlin, supplemented by a special online-only Solutions day on the 29th, but presentations will be live-streamed from Berlin, and will include questions from the online as well as the physical audience on-site. Packed with high-quality educational presentations and networking opportunities focussed on the world’s chosen digital document format, look for information and updates on everything from creating PDFs with HTML and modernising print production to using the format as an email archiving tool (and much more).
If you have any chance at all, we really recommend you follow the organisation’s advice to ‘get together and talk PDF!’ But another big accessibility tech topic may also be grabbing your attention right now, how to make the most out of all the interesting new accessibility features in Microsoft’s new Windows 11 OS.
Given Windows’ immense popularity, this is probably already on your agenda but even so a very useful introduction can be found here. The company is proud that with the release, it is taking “giant leaps towards accessibility” with new features such as CART services, speech commanding, screen readers, magnification programs, and even font-changing options to aid those with hypermetropia.
Check them out!
Carina Birt, UKAAF PRO and founder at Sarum PR.
