Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

Gary Bartos
2 min readMay 20, 2021

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Today, 20 May, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#gaad).

To quote the website GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay.org :

Thursday, May 20, 2021, marks the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities.

Mostly I’ve been blogging about the Swift programming language and topics related to image processing. But today it’s the day of the year to emphasize that my company, Echobatix, is developing a product to improve accessibility for gazillions of devices worldwide.

Yes, gazillions.

We can celebrate greater awareness of accessibility and related improvements for new products, but not all technology in our lives gets replaced or upgraded every two or three years. Waiting for the built world to become accessible — and by “built world” I mean the world we live in now — could be a very long wait.

Echobatix is doing its part to make that wait shorter.

We have an iOS app in TestFlight, and we’re expanding our ranks of blind and visually impaired (BVI) testers with each beta release.

When I worked in industrial automation I became squeamish about openly discussing products under development. Intellectual property theft was a problem. Right or wrong, my squeamishness remains when it comes to discussing products in development. But that’ll change soon enough! My team and I are now in position to begin discussing what public release of our iOS app.

Before any such announcement, I’ll almost certainly write several more posts on Swift.

Stay tuned!

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Gary Bartos
Gary Bartos

Written by Gary Bartos

Founder of Echobatix, engineer, inventor of assistive technology for people with disabilities. Keen on accessible gaming. echobatix@gmail.com

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