Every Friday at Dwellability, we like to highlight community members and their amazing stories of accomplishment…
“I am JoAnna, and my dream is that by the end of my career, Accessibility is no longer a specialized job title.”
My Story
I am a technical product leader advocating for the development of fully inclusive experiences and changing the technological landscape for people with disabilities. For nearly 20 years, I have defined a vision for the world and built teams, programs, and technology to support it. I also engage customers of all abilities in the process and obsess over understanding the unique aspects of their interaction with technology and their surrounding environments.
Early on in life, I became interested in helping PWD, as my nephew has ADHD and Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
My Work
I oversee a cross-functional team at Amazon of talented developers, testers, and technical product and program managers to ensure the company’s reading, shopping, and authoring experiences are inclusive to people of all abilities around the world. We develop features on Kindle’s to help people with reading disabilities enjoy reading more…
July 26, 2020 marked the 30th anniversary of the signing of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability, affording similar protections against discrimination as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Amazon is recognizing this moment in our nation's history with a continued commitment to accessible technology, including enhancements to the Kindle reading experience.
We believe reading is essential for a healthy society, and we want to inspire readers by making it easy to read more and get more out of reading. Kindle's Accessibility Team has been working for the last few years to build features that ensure readers of all abilities can reap the benefits of digital reading experiences.
Amazon's guiding principle of customer obsession extends to our work around accessibility. With 15% of the world's population having at least one disability, we owe it to our readers to obsess over ways to help them read more and get more enjoyment and learning from reading. Our team is working on a daily basis to help solve a fundamental aspect of literacy—access to reading, which, in turn, will lead to a more rewarding and fulfilling life. What can be better than that?
A multi-year collaboration between the Kindle Accessibility team and the National Federation of the Blind resulted in significant improvements to how customers who are blind read with Kindle. Improvements and features include:
· Customers who read with assistive technology can now use Amazon’s VoiceView screen reader to read on Kindle devices and with the Kindle app on Fire tablets.
· Fire tablets also work with popular Bluetooth refreshable braille displays.
· Customers who read on iOS, Android, or PC can use the screen readers supported on those devices to read more than 12 million screen reader supported books with Kindle.
Each member of the team has used their own unique experiences to influence the development of products like the team’s latest release, the Reading Ruler.
Snapshot of customer feedback
· “Brilliant! My 23-yr-old daughter is registered blind but she has some useful vision. She won't use audiobooks [at the moment], she prefers to read for herself. Books were so hard for her to access before she got her kindle so it's wonderful yours and other books come in so many formats!"
· "It’s great that Kindle has some accessibility functions to help those who maybe can’t read small print books."
· "I tried to read 30 books a few years ago and couldn't do it, really happy to have been able to do it this year. [Thank you] Kindle accessibility, I would have never gotten back into reading w/o you!"
Learn more about JoAnna on her LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannakhunt/
Learn more about Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/
As always, please share this newsletter with your friends and family. Also, visit our main website https://www.dwellability.com/ to learn more about Home Sharing for People with Disabilities…by People with Disabilities.
Cheers!
Jeff