IBM Launches First Ever Human Ability And Accessibility Centre

By Kritika Sharma
Sunday, December 02, 2007

IBM, leading enterprise end-to-end solutions company, has set up the Human Ability and Accessibility Centre in the country, which aims to make technology and information easily accessible to people with visual, cognitive and motor disabilities in India. This centre would cater to the diverse requirement of accessibility stakeholders in India including government’s bodies, corporate, academic institutions, researchers and NGOs. It provides technology for empowering differently abled people including people facing educational and economic challenges. This centre will also provide technologies to other companies working on solving the industry wide problem of making educational media and information accessible to a greater number of people.

While speaking to IT Var news, Shankar Annaswamy, managing director, IBM India and South Asia said, “India faces a growing need for inclusive development that fundamentally depends on addressing social, economic and physical disadvantages and create opportunities for every individual to realize the potential of their abilities. Globally and in India, IBM champions’ accessibility needs by bringing technologies and innovations that empower the differently abled and socially disadvantage through initiatives such as the Human Ability and Accessibility Centre.”

India is an important market for IBM and the company has been making significant investment from time to time. With this new centre, the company looks to enable IT hardware, software and services to be used by more people, either directly or in combination with assistive technology products. IBM is combining technologies such as speech recognition, wireless communications, and text- to- speech synthesis. According to the company this will improve the ability to access IT for those who have disabilities and are also increasingly in demand by today’s society seeking convenience and ease of use. Through the use of some innovative solutions developed by IBM research like Easy Web Browsing which is for visually impaired, WebAdopt2Me for people with cognitive impairments or low vision, IBM a Designer for disability simulator, Hindi Speech recognition, English assessment tool called Sensei, etc, this advanced virtual centre will enable human capability so that everyone can maximize their potential, regardless of ability or disability.