Blind and visually- impaired people dream of creating lives which are valuable. Like many people, the visually-impaired seek employment and opportunities to develop themselves.  A good friend of mine participated in an IT and website development conference and shared some startling new developments about this that I thought many other people would like to hear about.

A team of engineers at the University of Canberra, Australia, have set up an audio programming assistant (APA).  This team won the Imagine Cup at the Remix 2007 conference in Melbourne.  For the second consecutive year, the judges recognized this University of Canberra team.  These winners will represent Australia to compete in a forthcoming international competition.

This system they put together applies voice recognition technology with prompts for voice instructions.  It offers blind people the opportunity to obtain practical, technical qualifications and also equips people with job skills when they were previously unemployed or unemployable.

In Australia, Access Economics 2004 statistics reveal ~50,000 blind people and 480,000 who are considered as 'visually-impaired.' Vision Australia published 2007 unemployment statistics which show 69% of the blind and visually-impaired unemployed. This is how things are and how they will be unless society reacts decisively. The APA engineers are forward-thinking and hopeful. They have taken bold steps to create what is needed to empower other people.

The APA system has three main sub-systems: APA Studio.net, APA Web Browser and the APA website. This involves a programming tool that allows blind users to write, compile and run C# programs. APA uses a customized web browser that accesses web pages and reads out links to marked web pages.  The APA website gives blind people access to programming lessons and help forums to help learners and to support and programmer who desire it.

APA helps develop equal access in information technology. It will not only benefit visually-impaired and blind persons, but also employers, governments and academic institutions. Its a wave of the future. Think-out-of-the-box. Applaud progress. Helping others is also helping yourself. Promoting empowerment betters our world.  People feel good because they make a contribution and feel a useful part of society.