Instagram should acquire the technology behind the “Be My Eyes” app, designed for the blind and visually impaired, to enhance AI-powered search capabilities within individual Instagram posts. This technology, which reads static images (identifying objects within photos) and image text, could enable more advanced search functions—similar to the latest photo search features on iPhone and Android.
Side note: Computer file search should include the same functionality.
Facial Expressions App - A facial feature recognition AI tool designed for individuals who are blind, have autism, experience social difficulties, or work in fields such as law enforcement and detective work.
The app utilizes algorithms to detect facial expressions (such as identifying whether a person appears sad, happy, fearful, and their gender) displaying this information in a real-time interface. Additionally, it analyzes vocalizations to assist users in reading emotions. Whether accessed through a smartphone app with a camera-like feature or AI-powered glasses, this technology aims to enhance communication, improve social interactions, and provide critical insights in professional settings.
Testing with users who have disabilities is a great complement to compliance standards like WCAG and Section 508. If you are aiming for a comprehensive approach, you want to include people with a range of disabilities, such as:
Vision Impairments
Blindness
Low vision
Color blindness
Hearing Impairments
Deafness
Hard of hearing
Motor (Physical) Disabilities
Limited dexterity (e.g., from arthritis, cerebral palsy)
Paralysis (e.g., quadriplegia, paraplegia)
Amputations or limb differences
Tremors (e.g., from Parkinsons disease)
Cognitive & Neurodevelopmental Disabilities
Dyslexia
ADHD
Autism spectrum disorder
Intellectual disabilities
Memory impairments (e.g., due to brain injury or dementia)
Speech Disabilities
Muteness (unable to speak)
Speech impairments (e.g., stuttering, dysarthria)
Neurological & Other Conditions
Epilepsy (sensitivity to flashing content)
Migraines triggered by visual stimuli
Being a Peer Recovery Specialist can help you have the skills to build meaningful friendships outside of work. It involves showing respect, earning trust, and being culturally aware by demonstrating understanding. Friends support each other when needed (keeping with respecting boundaries) and instill hope in one another’s lives. Engaging in self-care, sharing creativity, and being truthful strengthens connections. Friendships thrive on mutual respect and equality. Practice inclusion and compassion by showing empathy when meeting new people. Be a good listener, focus on your friend, and avoid distractions. Set aside prejudices and refrain from making hurtful comments. Don’t interrupt; instead, show genuine interest in what they are saying. Demonstrating that you have “been there” fosters empathy and connection. Finally, understand their perspectives.
While it is important to be supportive, maintain professional boundaries, and avoid forming personal friendships with the peers you are helping in their recovery journey.
Contest Winner
By Jennifer Beser
Advocating for employees' well-being and combating mental health stigma in the workplace is essential for creating a productive, supportive environment. Integrating a Peer Support Specialist into the workplace can significantly reduce stress, anxiety, and depression among employees, ultimately leading to improved performance and job satisfaction. A company that prioritizes mental health will naturally attract top talent, as candidates seek employers who care about their well-being.
Peer Support Specialists are crucial in creating a safe and supportive work environment. They are trained to recognize early signs of distress in employees and can guide them to appropriate resources, such as counselors, support groups, or wellness programs. Additionally, they can lead practices like meditation and mindfulness, promoting overall mental well-being. Encouraging employees to keep a journal for self-care and self-reflection can also be an effective tool for managing stress, life challenges, professional burnout, and compassion fatigue.
Understanding the impact of role stressors in the workplace is crucial, as they play a significant role in shaping an employee's well-being and performance. These stressors are challenges that employees face in their roles, often leading to increased stress and decreased productivity. One common stressor is role ambiguity, which occurs when employees are unclear about their duties, priorities, or the chain of accountability, resulting in confusion and frustration. Another issue is inadequate feedback or supervision, where a lack of clear guidance or evaluation makes it difficult for employees to know how to improve. Lastly, role overload happens when the workload or expectations are unrealistic, creating excessive pressure and making it hard to meet deadlines without compromising quality. Combined, these factors can diminish job satisfaction and overall morale.
By addressing mental health issues proactively, companies can reduce potential legal liabilities and protect their reputation. Investing in mental health initiatives also leads to long-term financial benefits, such as lower healthcare costs, reduced absenteeism, and increased productivity.
All Peer Support sessions are confidential, providing a private space for employees to share their thoughts, feelings, and work-related concerns. Moreover, companies should hold seminars and training to address mental health stigma in the workplace and discuss strategies for overcoming it.
Technology can also play a pivotal role in mediating peer support. Companies can create dedicated pages on their intranet or social networking platforms to share affirmations, mental health awareness tips, and advice on overcoming stigma and the imposter syndrome. For example, social media pages like Let's Talk About Mental Health demonstrate how companies can use digital platforms to discuss mental health openly and share affirmations, creating a culture of support and awareness.
By implementing these strategies, companies can create a workplace that not only prioritizes mental health but also fosters an environment of safety, support, and productivity.
References:
https://www.cdc.gov/workplacehealthpromotion/initiatives/resource-center/index.html
https://www.apa.org/topics/workplace
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/mentalhealth/
Shekinah Terrence, Beth (2024)
Self-Care: An Essential Practice for Peer Recovery Specialists, presentation.
Kahn, R.L., Wolfe, D.M., Quinn, R.P., Snoek, J.D., & Rosenthal, R.A. (1964). Organizational Stress: Studies in Role Conflict and Ambiguity. New York: Wiley.
Greenhaus, J. H., & Beutell, N. J. (1985). "Sources of conflict between work and family roles." Academy of Management Review, 10(1), 76-88.
I visited the MD Department of Disabilities Assistive Tech Department, where I was trained in various technologies, such as eye trackers, magnifiers, voice amplifiers, and braille displays.
An AI-powered site designed for users seeking colleges to attend offers personalized recommendations based on user preferences, leveraging machine learning. Users fill out a form detailing their criteria for a college, and the site provides the top three choices that match their needs. Alternatively, users can search for specific colleges and filter their desired programs of study, including undergraduate, master’s, doctorate, and certification programs, if available. The site will display relevant classes currently offered based on their interests. Users can also specify any accommodations, such as those covered under a 504 Plan. Additionally, users can filter results by cost, available college scholarships, and SAT scores.
Students with disabilities should be able to upload their Section 504 documentation directly to the student portal. Certain documentation will be accessible to both student teachers and regular teachers, enabling them to view and understand the specific accommodations and modifications required for each student. By having this information readily available, teachers can be more aware of and responsive to each student's disability-related needs, fostering an inclusive and supportive educational environment. This system will streamline the communication of important information, ensuring that all educational staff are informed and can provide the necessary support to help students succeed.
This approach highlights the benefits of accessibility and awareness among educators, which can lead to better educational outcomes for students with disabilities.
My Proposal:
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Jennifer Beser, and I recently came across your innovative AI Glasses product, which truly impressed me with its potential to enhance communication and understanding for individuals with hearing impairments. I believe there are even more profound applications for this technology that could significantly benefit those with mental health challenges, specifically individuals suffering from schizophrenia.
As highlighted on your website, the AI Glasses offer functionalities that help users see, translate, and understand conversations. I propose expanding the use of these glasses to support individuals experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations, a common symptom of schizophrenia. Here’s how the AI Glasses could be transformative in this context:
Auditory Hallucinations:
Verification of Voices: Individuals with schizophrenia often struggle to distinguish between real and hallucinated voices. AI Glasses could provide real-time transcription of spoken words from actual surroundings, helping users verify the authenticity of the voices they hear. This real-time reassurance could significantly reduce confusion and anxiety.
Visual Hallucinations:
Reality Validation: If the glasses have recording capabilities, users could capture what they see and review the footage later, potentially with a healthcare professional. This could help them differentiate between real and hallucinatory visuals, offering a powerful reality validation and grounding tool.
Therapeutic Support:
Enhanced Communication: The AI Glasses could be used during therapy sessions, enabling better communication between patients and therapists. Real-time translation and transcription could help individuals articulate their experiences more clearly and accurately, facilitating more effective treatment.
Educational and Training Tool:
Training for Caregivers and Professionals: The glasses could be used to train caregivers and mental health professionals in understanding and responding to the experiences of individuals with schizophrenia. This can foster more empathetic and effective care strategies.
Data Collection for Research:
Insights for Mental Health Research: With appropriate privacy measures, the data collected by the glasses could provide invaluable insights into the patterns and triggers of hallucinations, contributing to research and the development of better therapeutic approaches.
I am enthusiastic about the potential for AI Glasses to become a versatile tool in mental health support and am keen to discuss this idea further with you. With some adaptation, AI Glasses can play a significant role in enhancing the quality of life for individuals with schizophrenia and similar conditions.
edX Verified for Introduction to Web Accessibility.
Fast Track to Accessibility for Designers
Deque University
Basic PDF Accessibility
Deque University
Eliminating hierarchical titles can foster a more collaborative work environment, encouraging individuals to focus on their skills and contributions rather than rank. It promotes a culture where everyone's strengths are valued, potentially enhancing productivity.
Excel Accessibility involves several key steps to accommodate users with diverse needs. Running the accessibility checker provides a systematic approach to identifying and fixing issues, highlighting problems, and offering guidance on resolution. Utilizing accessible templates from office.com or within Excel helps create documents with well-organized sheet tabs and descriptive filenames, improving navigation for screen reader users. Enhancing navigability further involves structuring spreadsheet and table content with proper headers and avoiding merging or nested tables. Creating meaningful hyperlinks and adding descriptive text to shapes, videos, and images ensures a more informative experience. Alt text for charts, images, and tables contributes to accessibility, and utilizing cell styles with high contrast enhances readability. When saving Excel files as PDFs, enabling accessibility and utilizing Adobe Acrobat's features help ensure an accessible final document. The Accessibility Checker and Action Wizard in Adobe Acrobat assist in addressing common issues and ensuring a thorough accessibility check. These practices contribute to a more inclusive and user-friendly experience for individuals with varying accessibility needs.
PowerPoint Accessibility involves addressing various elements to enhance the experience for all users, particularly those with visual or auditory impairments. The guidelines recommend specific color contrast ratios for text, providing a step-by-step process for fixing accessibility errors. Outlines can be utilized to improve color contrast, and the use of color filters in Windows settings aids those with color blindness. Descriptive icons, rather than shapes, are recommended for better identification, and differentiation in line graphs/charts helps users with low vision or color blindness. Implementing screen reader-friendly features involves adding titles, checking accessibility, organizing internal object order, grouping objects, and providing alternative text. Attention to detail, like removing automatically generated text, unchecking unnecessary items, and setting meaningful URLs, contributes to a more inclusive experience. For tables, adding header rows, avoiding cell merging, and incorporating video descriptions, captions, and subtitles further contribute to accessibility. Closed caption tracks allow viewers to customize their experience, and the Selection Pane in Mac aids in setting the reading order for screen readers. Ultimately, these considerations ensure that PowerPoint presentations are accessible and effective for a diverse audience.
PDF Accessibility involves several key steps to make documents inclusive for all users. These steps include tagging various elements within the document structure, such as headings, links, lists, tables, artifacts, figures, and form fields. Images require alternative text descriptions, and appropriate metadata should be set, including title, author, keywords, subject, and language. The reading order is crucial, established through tags and the reading order panel, and color contrast is tested for enhanced readability. The accessibility check is performed by clicking the left side of the PDF bar, right-clicking, selecting tags, and checking off "Highlight content." Additional actions involve setting document properties, conducting an accessibility check, and fixing errors. Manual checks with screen readers like NVDA and JAWS are recommended. The process also covers handling untagged PDF conversions, addressing OCR/scanned PDFs, and using tools like the axe Monitor for accessibility scans. The importance of defining tab order, creating and managing tags, and associating content with tags is emphasized throughout the document creation and accessibility enhancement process. Ultimately, this comprehensive approach ensures that PDF documents are visually clear and accessible to individuals using assistive technologies.
Word Accessibility is crucial for ensuring that documents are inclusive and accessible to a diverse audience, including individuals with disabilities. Utilizing built-in tools like the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft Word enhances document accessibility. Maintaining a text size 12 and organizing content with appropriate headings and subheadings improves readability and navigation. Meaningful images, graphs, and charts should have alt text that accurately conveys their purpose, with the option to provide long descriptions for complex content. The use of color is addressed to accommodate color-blind individuals, with recommended minimum contrast ratios for text, buttons, icons, and graphical components. Headings, spacing, links, and tables are optimized for accessibility, employing descriptive links, appropriate spacing, and well-structured tables with header rows. The document provides detailed instructions on saving as tagged PDF, emphasizing the importance of enabling accessibility features during conversion. Bookmarks are automatically generated based on the document's heading structure, facilitating easy navigation within the PDF. Word Accessibility guidelines aim to make documents more inclusive, user-friendly, and compliant with accessibility standards.
Identify and Address Key Pain Points
Articulate Areas Requiring Improvement
Eliminate Redundant Design Functions
Simplify Complex Features Unnecessarily Complicating User Interaction
Streamline Sections for Enhanced Usability
Gauge User Sentiment towards the Legacy System
Explore Pain Points Encountered in Daily Tasks
Leverage User Input for Informed Future Design Enhancements
Feature Exploration Workshop
The UX/UI Designer should moderate a workshop to gather more stakeholder requirements. On the wall, the team marked three rows for the feature requirements: 'Must-Have' features, 'Should-Have' features, 'Parking Lot' features, and, to the lower bottom right, 'No' features. The stakeholders will vote on which feature goes into each row. Throughout the workshop, the UX/UI Designer plays a pivotal role, offering assistance in collecting, recording, analyzing, and ultimately implementing the results derived from the collaborative decision-making process.
