Thinking Outside the Bun!!!
A popular chain of fast-food restaurants in South Africa is serving hamburgers with words in Braille baked right in!
Wimpy, a UK-based company with restaurants throughout Europe and Asia has taken a huge leap forward in courting visually impaired diners by serving hamburgers with words in Braille formed with sesame seeds! So far, this ingenious idea is limited to South Africa but I doubt it will be long before the idea catches on elsewhere.
The sesame seed Braille words spell out such messages as “100 per cent pure beef burger made for you.”Brilliant! Wimpy South Africa is allowing the visually impaired to actually see what they’re eating.
This kind of thinking outside the bun is what we do at Oak Grove Technologies. We start with the basic design – is it accessible to everyone? Are choices based on color the blind cannot see or on sounds the deaf cannot hear? We design our courseware at the outset to accommodate all learners, regardless of challenge rather than retrofitting later. This saves time and money and provides the disabled learner with an equivalent experience to the abled learner. We do not use text-based alternative interactions.
There is a huge market out there. If companies design their products to suit everyone, regardless of physical challenge, they will very likely see their profits climb.
To see the reaction of their blind customers, select the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nszEBLtI3qg&feature=endscreen&NR=1
Equal Accessibility
Do you practice an "equal" approach to eLearning development? The goal of Section 508 is to provide persons with disabilities access to information in a comparable manner to the access available to people without disabilities.
Time after time, I see separate but equal opportunities. There’s the “click here for a text transcript” of a video where learning relies on observing body movement or techniques. A video clip of a physician requiring a patient to “do this” or “walk across the room like this” doesn’t get the message over to an individual who is blind.
Consider preparing the video script with more clues. Instead of saying “raise your arms,” be specific: “Raise your arms in front of you, palms up, and parallel to the floor.” Without this clue, a learner could reasonably expect the arms to be raised above the head with palms facing out.
Try this for yourself. Ask a friend or colleague to raise their left arm. In which position is it raised? Did you tell them to do that, or were they guessing? Now ask another person to close their eyes and this time give them explicit instructions – raise your left arm above your head and bend it at the elbow.
Remember, if you’re working with existing video, you must insert these clues. There’s a danger this will throw off your synchronization, in which case you’ll have to edit the video and insert pauses long enough to sufficiently accommodate the clue.
