The National Federation of the Blind and Motorola announced that they will cooperate to “promote technologies that improve the accessibility of cell phones to blind consumers.” As a result, some of the future Motorola handsets, which will be released next year, will provide verbal readouts of information displayed on the screen to assist blind people. Among the information that will be read to the users are time and date, battery level, signal strength, user’s phone number, caller ID, voice mail alerts, incoming, missed and received calls. In addition, blind users will also be able to input and access contacts, and various other settings.
It’s good that Motorola has agreed to cooperate with the National Federation of the Blind, and I’m hoping that every major handset maker will do its part to make its devices possible to use by the blind people. Simply said – it’s the right thing to do!