The most exciting developments in tech don’t come from wireless juicers and Fitbits. The real breakthroughs are tools providing eyes and ears for people who are visually impaired or have hearing loss. With assistive tech like this, it’s easier than ever to make your business accessible.
Diversity in the workforce brings well documented benefits to employers. Harvard Business Review recently extolled the value of efficiency in meetings, pointing to the effective communication and listening techniques learned from deaf colleagues.
The value of building inclusive, disability-confident workplaces is recognised by policy-makers too. Before Christmas, Government published plans to transform employment prospects for disabled people over the next 10 years, noting that currently, disabled people are twice as likely to move out of work, and less likely to be in work.
Almost half of people over 50 have hearing loss, and employers risk losing talented and experienced staff if they feel unable to work due to acquired hearing impairment.
This means employers could be missing out on recruiting the best staff if they have a disability, or saying goodbye to staff with years of experience if they develop disability, like age-related hearing loss, during their career.
The good news is that simple solutions exist to ensure your business won’t miss out on disabled talent. Research from Action on Hearing Loss and YouGov found that when it comes to employment, the biggest barrier people with hearing loss face is the attitude of employers who simply don’t feel well equipped to retain staff with hearing loss.
Surprisingly, the research also found that many employers had never heard of Access to Work, which provides government funding for assistive technology and support for employees with disability. As consumers, we’ve embraced digital accessories from smartwatches to earbuds, but for employees with disabilities or hearing loss, similar tools can make a workplace accessible.
Innovative Tech
Screen readers, which read out on-screen text like emails or PDFs, are an invaluable staple of the workplace for employees with visual impairment. Microsoft has taken this ingenious tool a step further and made a highly effective (and free) reader for the real world, using artificial intelligence to audibly describe live images with phenomenal accuracy. Simply by pointing a smartphone or tablet at a handwritten note, a barcode, or even a colleague, users with the Seeing AI app will hear a description of what, and who, their phone sees.
Incredible progress has been made too in the world of hearing loss. Ground-breaking apps are competing to be the best at real-world speech translation, with many using Google’s Speech Cloud to subtitle meetings and conversations in real time.
PowerPoint already offers an automatic subtitle feature, which allows presenters to have their words typed on-screen as they speak. This is great for foreign language speakers, or anyone struggling to hear spoken words because of hearing loss or a noisy environment (think about those team drinks in the pub, or breakfast briefs in the coffee shop). The added bonus of all these tools is that transcriptions can also be used for meeting minutes and subtitles boost SEO for online content, which means they’re likely to have mainstream appeal.
Boosting sound is another way to improve accessibility in the workplace. Many people wear hearing aids, a common form of assistive tech, and their value can be enhanced even further with simple amplifiers like the Roger Pen. This pocket-sized Pen with its wireless microphone can be placed on tables or podiums during meetings and events, where it feeds directly into the linked hearing aids and provides clarity of speech during otherwise noisy dialogues.
Tools like this can be transformative for people with hearing loss, and smart businesses will maximise the opportunities that assistive tech has to offer an aging workforce.
Recent research from Action on Hearing Loss found that over two-fifths of people with hearing loss who had retired early said this was due to their hearing loss. In response, the charity produced a myth-busting guide to help dispel some common misconceptions about hearing loss (such as widely held belief that people with hearing loss can’t use the telephone, which is possible with simple assistive tech), and is working with employers to highlight the simple steps that will help employees realise their potential.
To find out more about the Action on Hearing Loss Working for Change Campaign, which focuses on the simple steps employers can take to make their workplace accessible for people with hearing loss, please visit Working for Change.