The S01 runs Android “Ice Cream Sandwich” 4.0 in a near-unrecognizable form, featuring a simplified layout with very large onscreen buttons. But it also has other features tailored to its target audience, such as what Orange describes as “a unique screen technology” that essentially forces users to press icons harder in order to make them work – the idea here is to help those who aren’t used to touchscreens to avoid accidentally launching things they don’t intend to launch.

The handset also adjusts the frequency range of its audio depending on the user’s age, and even slows down the speech of fast-talking callers. A personal security alarm is also included.

“As Fujitsu’s first extensive entry into the smartphone market outside Japan, we are delighted that Orange — a company that holds a strong position in the European market — will be offering our phone, which features Fujitsu-exclusive human-centric technologies,” Fujitsu corporate SVP Nobuo Otani said in a statement. “We are committed to the success of this partnership as we strive to expand our smartphone business overseas, while advancing the promotion of Japanese technology worldwide.”

This shouldn’t be so unusual

It’s worth noting that Fujitsu is not the only mobile phone maker to target senior citizens: Sweden’s Doro has built an entire business around that market, although its handsets are much simpler. Doro also has an application pack for making Android tablets more senior-friendly, and a similar approach has been taken in the smartphone realm by carriers such as Sprint.

In some ways, the application pack idea could serve as a transitional solution for senior citizens who find the standard smartphone interface a bit difficult to handle. If Microsoft’s Windows Phone styling becomes an influencer and UI designs become more generally big-button, there will be less of a need for such things in the future.

But more fundamental technological solutions, such as those Fujitsu is displaying in the Raku-Raku/Stylistic range, will always find an audience. And let’s face it, with an ageing population in much of the developed world, there’s a growing market to address here. Looking at things that way, it’s actually quite surprising how few players are focusing on the accessibility angle today.

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Hangout Captions were announced by Google’s Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black, who wrote on Google+ that users can either use in live captions from a professional transcription service, or simply do it themselves and type the spoken word into a text box within the Hangout app. “This is an early look at the app so you can tell us what you think,” she added. Black illustrated the functionality with the following video:

This isn’t the first time Google has addressed issues of accessibility for Google+. The Google+ team did some tests to better support sign language for the video chat service a year ago, and the company added captions for Google+ videos last month.

Google has also been adding a number of captioning features to YouTube. The site is now supporting machine captioning in multiple languages, and added captioning for live events a year ago.

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The extension, which is aptly called Accessible Hangouts, uses text-to-speech to tell blind people when they are entering and exiting their Hangouts, and even reads all the text chat messages of a Hangout out loud. Take a peek at Mansour’s demo below:

Mansuour wrote in a Google+ post Wednesday night that he hacked the extension together in a few hours after meeting a blind war veteran in a Google+ Hangout:

I was writing on the chat on the left, and it was really difficult for him to read the text. I am really into accessibility, and I worked on it a lot in Chromium in the past, and I really wanted to help him. So I told Tim, ‘what if the chat spoke to you?’ Tim said, ‘that would be awesome’. When I saw the big smile on his face, I had to do it!

The Accessible Hangouts extension is an open source project, and Mansour’s hope is that Google will eventually integrate it natively into Hangouts. The chances for such a step are actually pretty good: Google has spent a lot of time making Hangouts more accessible and has in the past worked on ways to optimize the group video chat for mute and deaf people.

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The field test is spearheaded by Google Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black as well as the Engineering Director Chee Chew, who kicked off the initiative with a post to Google Plus that explained his personal stake in the issue:

“One area that I’m personally quite passionate about is facilitating communications and community for the deaf. My grandfather, aunt, and uncle were/are all deaf. While I’m very much a novice, I find ASL to be a beautiful expressive language. I hope that Hangouts can be awesome for the deaf (and hard of hearing) community as well as the hearing.”

Video chat applications have long been used by hearing impaired users to communicate via sign language. Skype seems to be particularly popular with hard of hearing users, and some users have turned to the service to learn and practice sign language.

Google is asking Google Plus Hangouts users for feedback on sign language support.

Multiuser video chat would be the logical next step for hard of hearing users, but there are also some technical challenges associated with group video conferencing. Google Hangouts, for example, is optimized for audible communication, as it switches its focus between users based on their microphone input. The idea of this feature is to prominently display the video camera input of the user who is currently talking, which has the added benefit of giving users an incentive not to talk over each other.

Gauging participation based on microphone input levels obviously doesn’t work for users who communicate via sign language, so Google is now looking for other cues. “We need an indicator for who has the floor,” explained Chee in his post, adding: “I’m sure there are subtle issues that I don’t know.”

Making its video products accessible to deaf users isn’t just stewardship for Google; it could also help the company avoid future liabilities. Disability advocates have begun targeting online media offerings in recent weeks to force them to adopt closed captions for web video. Lawsuits against CNN and Netflix allege the companies discriminate against deaf and hard of hearing users by failing to provide captions for each and every video served online. Some of the points made by the plaintiffs in these cases could also be used to argue that a video chat service that focuses on audible speech discriminates against deaf users.

Regardless of the motivation, early feedback from Google Plus users about the Hangouts field test is overwhelmingly supportive and even enthusiastic. In a comment on Chew’s post, one user summed up his feelings this way:

“I actually cried with joy at reading this post and finding out that Google and the Google+ team actually care about all of their user base. Thank you very much for just thinking about us.”

Picture of kids learning sign language courtesy of Flickr user daveynin.

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YouTube has been providing automatic captioning of its vast library of content since early last year, using the same type of voice recognition technology that’s also at work on any Android phone. However, automatic captioning isn’t always accurate, and there’s no way for a publisher to correct automatically-generated captions in real time. That’s why the new YouTube Live captions feature relies on professional real-time captioning professionals instead of algorithms.

Google has hired a team of San Francisco-based Computer Assisted Realtime Transcription professionals to make sense of the spoken word during the Google I/O keynotes. “Working in teams on-site at I/O, they type at several hundred words a minute on specialized stenography equipment,” explained Black via email. She added: “We project the text on screens at I/O for the audience, and the text is also streamed live to an AppEngine gadget that delivers it to our website and YouTube channel.” Visitors to the site will then be able to translate the text in real time using machine translations.

YouTube officially unveiled its live streaming offering a month ago and has since given a limited number of partners a chance to broadcast their live video on its site. These partners will also be able to use the same AppEngine gadget, but they’ll have to work with and pay for their own live transcription service. Videos with captions will be searchable in full, which should give live streaming partners a considerable SEO bump.

Black and some of her coworkers are going to show attendees of Google I/O on Wednesday how they used Google’s AppEngine and YouTube’s API to implement live captions. The AppEngine gadget itself will be published as open-source code on Google Code, and Black told me it could theoretically also be used by YouTube’s competition. “We designed the gadget primarily to meet the needs of YouTube Live partners, but the code can easily be repurposed to work with other streamed text providers, and even other sites,” she said, adding: “You could use it on any website to provide live captions, regardless of where the video is hosted, or even without video at all.”

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The bill, which was authored by Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), calls for broadcasters to caption any online programming that previously aired on TV. Video bloggers and smaller online studios don’t have to start transcribing each and every show any time soon, as online-only programming is exempt for now. However, broadcasters like Comedy Central could be forced to transcribe online-exclusive content if they’d ever come to a point where the majority of their programming is online-exclusive.

Broadcasters won’t have to scramble to include closed captioning overnight: The bill institutes a commission, which then needs to come up with an appropriate schedule for closed caption requirements. Still, it may force broadcasters to think about captions sooner rather than later, and Plymedia’s VP of business development Matt Knopf thinks that’s a good thing in and of itself. The vast majority of U.S. broadcasters and Web TV destinations don’t currently offer captions, Knopf told me during a phone call earlier this week, with ABC.com and Hulu being some of the few exceptions to the rule.

However, Knopf believes that broadcasters actually have a lot to gain from using closed captions. “It’s not just about doing the right thing,” he said, even though providing a means of access for some 36 million deaf or hearing-impaired Americans certainly is a good reason in and of itself. However, captions also help to monetize online content, since transcripts make web video searchable, making them a natural SEO tool. He added that internal research has shown that videos with captions are viewed 38 percent longer than videos without.

Plymedia has been offering captions for three years now and counts the Wall Street Journal and Howcast amongst its customers. The company’s technology is integrated into Brightcove, Ooyala, Kit Digital and a number of other platforms. Plymedia also supports captions for live video, and Knopf told me that the company is using a network national court-report certified transcription experts to do so.

Plymedia isn’t the only company offering captioning services, but Knopf told me he actually views many offerings as complementary. YouTube, for example, began to automatically transcribe all of its videos in March, but the video site actually recommends Plymedia and others if you want more accuracy for your transcripts. The Participatory Culture Foundation recently unveiled a project to crowdsource the transcription of web videos.

Knopf believes that such efforts, combined with legislation like that which is in the house now, will lead to more and more video being available with subtitles. In the end, that’s also going to benefit those of us who are not hearing impaired, he said, pointing to recent report that the majority of online video is consumed in the office — a space where catching up on your favorite TV show has to be discrete at times. “We are the boss button for online video,” he said.

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Don’t get me wrong: Flash is fine when used for specific purposes, such as video playback and animation. But it can be overused. There was a fad for Flash-based web site introduction screens several years ago. We quickly found that just about everybody was clicking the “skip intro” link. (There was even a site dedicated to Flash usability called “Skip Intro.”) As a result, Flash introductions are much rarer these days. Still, Flash is ubiquitous, and that can cause problems.

• There are too many Flash sites that are one big SWF file. This can mean that site visitors must wait for the whole file to load before links become clickable. And, of course, in such sites the browser’s back button is disabled, or will take visitors completely away from the site (unless the file was displayed in a popup window, and I’m sure everyone realizes the problems that that causes).
• Despite the Google improvements, Flash sites are not as search-engine friendly as text-based sites. See SEO expert Josh Freedman’s Ten Tips for a Better Website.
• As of a year ago, Flash had not yet achieved 40 percent penetration of the cell phone market.
• Adobe claims that “Flash content reaches 99 percent of Internet viewers,” but this figure only applies to the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Japan. What about the rest of the world?
• Because of the file sizes involved, Flash sites don’t work well for folks with limited-bandwidth connections.
• Flash sites can be made accessible to those with disabilities, but require special techniques that are not widely used.

I’m sure that Flash enthusiasts will have lots of ways to get around these limitations. But really, why build a site that requires such workarounds, when you can make an appealing site with no, or limited, use of Flash?

When do you use Flash, and what alternatives have you found for creating visual appeal on your sites?

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