Transcript: Sarah Bourne, Director of IT Accessibility, Massachusetts State CIO Office
PEAT asked Sarah Bourne, Director of IT Accessibility at the Massachusetts State CIO Office: “In ten years, what ideas, initiatives, policies, or best practices will have had the biggest possible impact on accessible technology and the employment of people with disabilities?”
Bourne: I think that in ten years we’re gonna see some remarkable advances in the nature of technology itself that says that some the battles we’re fighting over now about tagging your HTML properly and so on and so forth may be able to be solved by technologies that are only now coming out of laboratories or maybe are going to be invented tomorrow, so I think the more that that machines can do the less work you have to do to convince people to do the right thing. In the meantime, the population is aging, people are getting used to ubiquitous computing, they can’t make their font larger and they’re trying to read their phone on the beach. Those types of annoyances will, I think, result in some changes to overall universal design improvements, and that’s going to benefit people with disabilities incredibly.
