Amazon Shares ‘12 Ways’ It Assists On Accessibility
Amazon this week published a blog post in which it details a dozen ways in which its devices are accessible to disabled people. The Seattle-based company’s post, bylined by Deb Landau, boasts accessibility has been a top priority “for a decade,” and encompasses everything from Alexa to Fire TV to Kindle to Prime Video and more.
“According to the World Health Organization, 16% of all people—one in six of us—currently experience a significant disability. [That] fact is at the heart of Amazon’s approach to designing devices and services like Alexa,” Landau wrote in the lede. “For over a decade, Amazon has worked with and for people with disabilities, including world experts, on disability and accessibility, and advocated for accessible design throughout the company.”
Landau’s post discusses a litany of features, beginning with the doyenne of digital assistants in Alexa. Here, Landau highlights Eye Gaze on Amazon’s Fire tablets, which enables people who can’t use common methods like voice or touch to manipulate their device(s) to instead use their eyes. Similarly, Call Translation and Captioning on something like the Echo Show “allows customers to communicate across languages, but also allows customers customers who are Deaf and hard of hearing to communicate with loved ones, as they get live call captioning,” Landau said. Additionally, Landau mentions the aforementioned Fire tablets also support voice control and third-party switches for those who cope with gross-motor disabilities.
Amazon’s post makes frequent mention of accessibility features of its Fire TV platform, including Dual Audio support for users with hearing aids to more accessibly get sound from their television. I’ve covered Fire TV numerous times in the past, most recently about a year ago when I interviewed Amazon’s Peter Korn, who serves as director of accessibility for devices and services, to discuss the platform’s then-new AI Search functionality. Notably in context of this week’s blog post, Korn said AI Search encapsulates Amazon’s philosophy on accommodating the disability community vis-a-vis accessibility. It may not only be convenient to some—it may be accessible to others.
“It [AI search] really captures the things we do for everyone that may be especially valuable for people with disabilities and things we do for people with disabilities may also valuable for everyone else,” he said to me around this time a year ago. “What’s essential for some may be useful for someone else… like dialogue that’s essential for someone with hearing loss, but any number of times it may be hard in the mix of this particular movie to hear the dialogue or the explosions in an action scene. I view generative AI searching as another example of that.”
As with its contemporaries, Amazon maintains a webpage devoted to accessibility.
