National Federation of the Blind praises Apple for making its devices accessible

iOS accessibility

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) recently passed a resolution calling upon Apple to push developers to make their apps more accessible to visually disabled individuals.

What makes this news is… Reuters, which reporter Christina Farr ran a story titled “Advocates for blind, deaf want more from Apple,” suggesting that Cupertino giant is at odds with the NFB. That, however, couldn’t be farther from the truth, prompting response from NFB’s President Mark A Riccobono.

Unsurprisingly he was everything but pleased with the Reuters piece, even calling it a “provocative and poorly reported article.” Quite the contrary, Riccobono says that Apple is one of the few companies worth praising, but that it too could further improve some of its practices. Here’s what he said:

Apple has done more for accessibility than any other company to date, and we have duly recognized this by presenting the company with at least two awards (including our annual Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award) and publicly praising it whenever the opportunity arises. We do not want to needlessly antagonize a company that has been such an outstanding accessibility champion. Nevertheless, inaccessible apps continue to proliferate, and blind users cannot update the apps on their iPhones without anxiety.

We can only join NFB’s stance and call upon other mobile industry companies to make their software more accessible to the disabled.

In the meantime, you can see listing of iOS accessibility features from here.

[Via: TUAW]