“It’s pretty much a free for all in the Android environment and because it’s a disparate community working on open source software, the first thing that goes out the window is accessibility.”

It was during a part-time language course several years ago that I struck up a conversation with a young architect. He had a new challenge with the firm he was working for to conceptually re-design a hospital to be more disabled-friendly. He moaned, believing it to be a boring project. I thought the opposite. How much of what we use everyday – busses, trains, elevators, hospitals – are actually designed with a holistic, functional goal, even for able-bodied people – and not just fodder for an architect’s ego? Not much. To be in a wheelchair, or suffering with speech impairment from a stroke must be a nightmare.

Read the rest of this entry →