Speaking of Apple and Accessibility

Katie Dupree has a nice feature at Mashable on 22-year-old Jordyn Castor, who has been blind since birth and now works as an accessibility engineer at Apple:

For Castor, Braille is crucial to her innovative work at Apple — and she insists tech is complementary to Braille, not a replacement.

“I use a Braille display every time I write a piece of code,” she says. “Braille allows me to know what the code feels like.”

In coding, she uses a combination of Nemeth Braille — or “math Braille” — and Alphabetic Braille. Castor even says that with the heavy presence of tech in her life, she still prefers to read meeting agendas in Braille.

“I can see grammar. I can see punctuation. I can see how things are spelled and how things are written out,” she says.

It’s no surprise, but interesting nonetheless, how many of the engineers who work on accessibility features at Apple are themselves users of those features.

★ Sunday, 10 July 2016