On 12th April the Swiss Federation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (SFB) organised a hackathon as part of the "Digital Accessibility NOW" awareness campaign. Over two dozen hackers dedicated themselves to one goal: making digital applications accessible.
Digitalisation is advancing in leaps and bounds - but is leaving people with disabilities, such as the blind and visually impaired, behind. As life becomes more digitalised, the hurdles in everyday life for visually impaired people are becoming greater, although they could become smaller thanks to the opportunities that digitalisation offers.
The issue became particularly explosive a few weeks earlier: The National Council has let blind and visually impaired people down by rejecting the motion for digital accessibility in the private sector, which called for binding principles to ensure the digital accessibility of ICT products and services in the private sector. "Promoting digital accessibility is not just a question of social jus-tice," says SFB board member Luana Schena. "Accessibility is also a key economic issue: Hundreds of thousands of people with visual impairments are also customers."
At the hackathon, five groups developed solutions for the development and production of digital applications, with one project standing out in particular: an AI-controlled shopping aid programmed directly at the hackathon. The jury, headed by Luana Schena, honoured the project with the Digital Accessibility NOW Award. What the groups all noted in their presentations: How surprisingly quickly functioning, easy-to-use accessible solutions for digital applications could be programmed - hacked - in just a single day.
Links (in German)
Hackathon blog post on our campaign page "Digital Accessibility NOW":
Tagesanzeiger-article «Für Blinde wird der Onlineshop zum Hindernislauf»: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/grenzen-der-digitalisierung-wo-blinde-im-onlineshop-scheitern-537460083046