Last week’s 12-12-12 concert in New York City’s Madison Square Garden was the latest effort to help recovery efforts on the eastern seaboard in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. Reuters reported that pre-show ticket sales and sponsorships had raised $32 million even before a single note was played by Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Alicia Keys, Billy Joel, Kanye West, The Rolling Stones, or any of the other music superstars spanning multiple generations. Concert producer John Sykes said that figure already surpassed the $30 million raised during the post-9/11 “Concert for New York City,” which he attributed to the advances made in technology over the past decade, especially in the realm of social media.
That same technology proved its value during the October storm and its immediate aftermath. As CBS News technology reporter, Chenda Ngak, noted at the time, 3.5 million tweets with the #sandy hashtag were sent the day the storm hit the East Coast, and Instagram photos of its impact were being uploaded at the rate of 10 per second.
When looking at how Sandy impacted people with disabilities, we linked to a story about how one Boston-based blogger used social media to help a 30-year-old man who was trapped on the 12th floor of his New York City apartment building when the loss of power rendered the elevators inoperative. The crisis was compounded by the man’s additional need to keep the batteries charged on the ventilator and other life-supporting equipment he used. Without Facebook and other Web-based tools, no one might have even known where he and his wife were until it was too late.
So it’s heartening to see technology developers making accessibility a priority during this period where emergency preparedness and response measures are assessed and adjusted based on the lessons learned. Just last week, the Emergency 2.0 Wiki Working Group announced the launch of a new “Accessibility Toolkit” that would facilitate access to social media platforms for people with disabilities during a crisis.
A blog post by Accessibility Reference Group leader Richard Corby says the multinational team of developers intend the toolkit to be used not only by people with disabilities but also government officials, emergency responders, media, and businesses to ensure critical information is being disseminated to these individuals. Corby writes:
For example, the main Twitter website can’t be easily read with a screen reader, a program that reads out information on a screen for people who are blind. In the kit we point users to alternative sites such as Easy Chirp to read tweets. As people tweet in real time, an accessible app such as this can provide immediate notification of when a fire starts or when flash floods hit a town.
The National Rehabilitation Information Resource Center (NARIC) also posted links to two surveys being conducted by the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies that gauged accessibility needs for wireless users both in day-to-day activities and emergency communications. Responses collected from these surveys will aid government regulators and wireless industry professionals to better meet the needs of people with disabilities. Please share with anyone you know that might like to contribute.
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Image by robinsonsmay (Aaron).
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