Oana Ciobotea: What is your understanding and experience of accessibility when working in voice projects
Sara Oliver: Something which I agree, and I’ve been hearing quite a few times, is that all of us, to some degree or at a certain point in our lives, become partly or fully disabled. Open Voice, during the workshop on accessibility, shared a fantastic image that explains this idea.
We can always break an arm or a leg, lose our sight temporarily, or even lose our voice at a friend’s gathering. Just consider how many people use glasses in the world. Therefore, when talking about accessibility, we must see beyond a special condition, especially in User Experience Design.
I’ve personally never seen Voice as the only mode to enhance accessibility. I am a strong advocate of multimodality.
From a user perspective, considering different contexts and channels to carry on an interaction makes things easier. For example, suppose you break your right arm, and you are a right-handed person. You now have a temporary disability. As a result, you will type a message on your smartphone very slowly. Still, you care to overcome that by controlling most of the functions of your phone via Voice, changing from voice to tap to your convenience.