Computer apps: how can they influence in the life of disabled people?
We are living a digital era where everything is changing faster than even before. Our habits are been affected by the culture of the global digital culture.
The new technologies allowed the society to be more inclusive for people with disabilities, also are starting to be useful to people with different difficulties. For example, anyone who uses the Underground will recognise the robotic voice that tells us all to “mind the gap”. But for some people, minding the gap is not so simple. If you are blind or deaf, you’ll probably find it much harder to navigate. There is an app for mobile phones called “Metrociego” that helps to blind people to use the public transport.
There are apps for navigating in the roads, keeping clear of obstacles, enhancing your sense of listening, helping you type easily and more.
Some apps like this are helpful to empower disabled people to follow an easier routine. Blind people are the ones that made more use of this type of technological applications in the activities of daily living.
New technologies and employability
New technologies are helping to improve the quality of life and the lifestyle of disabled people, raising their employment rates and giving a boost to them to have a similar lifestyle of the rest of the humans being able to do activities that before were very difficult to them. For example ADISLI is a non-profitable entity that helps to physically or intellectually disabled people to develop their life projects and they try to construct a more inclusive society. Now, they are working in a project called “Espacio Conecta” with the foundation Vodafone Spain helping intellectually limited people to improve their ability to work with new technologies.
Nowadays, it’s essential to use electronic devices to do very basic things like could be to communicate with other people, buy some products that are exclusively online, look for job opportunities… Even if the technologies are starting to be adapted for disabled people and they are starting to be very useful for them in some areas, it’s well known that it’s not enough. Hence, it’s necessary to continue investing in adaptive technologies.
Nevertheless, it’s evident all the difficulties that a disabled person needs to get over to try to live a normal lifestyle. Hence, it means that we should continue working with adaptive technologies and developing them to reduce the technological gap into these collectives. On the other hand there is the economical issue. Some of these devices usually have a higher cost than a similar product but without the adaptive technology. Due to this problem, it’s important to take into account the most disadvantaged and vulnerable social groups.
