Announcing Sight Tech Global 2021

[kestrell]

I attended the first Sight Tech Global Virtual Conference last December, and I learned so much! Topics not only included technology, but disability rights and how AI bias affects visually impaired people. I encourage anyone who wants to learn about the newest technologies for visually impaired people to register for this conference, especially since it's free!

Posted to TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/15/announcing-sight-tech-global-2021/

Shortly after the first Sight Tech Global event, in December last year, Apple and Microsoft announced remarkable new features for mobile phones. Anyone could point the phone camera at a scene and request a "scene description." In a flash, a cloud-based, computer vision AI determined what was in the scene and a machine-voice read the information.

Learning that "a room contains three chairs and a table" might not seem like a big advance for the sighted, but for blind or visually impaired people, the new feature was a notable milestone for accessibility technology: An affordable, portable and nearly universal device could now "see" on behalf of just about anyone.

Technologies like scene description will be on the agenda at the second annual Sight Tech Global event, December 1-2, 2021. The free, sponsor-supported, virtual and global event will convene many of the world's top technologists, researchers, advocates and founders to discuss how rapid advances in technology, many centered on AI, are altering — both improving and complicating — accessibility for people with sight loss.

Register today — it's free.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfberR7NW3F74cBNleiOVauGQ8wrSV0FcZqf1HH5X60mUrS6Q/viewform?fbzx=4093129549110261409

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

OOoooooOOooooooOOO

Last year's was a gas -- can't wait!

[kestrell]

Yes, and I should really start emphasizing that, although the conference emphasizes tech for visually impaired people, a lot of the tech and especially the topics, such as discussions of disability rights and how AI bias affects pwd, are important to everyone with a disability. It also inspired me to start learning more about areas of tech that I hadn't thought about as relating to me as a visually impaired person before the conference, such as augmented reality.

[jesse_the_k]

And! the entirety of last year’s event lives on at

https://sighttechglobal.com/agenda/

That URL will work until the end of the summer, when they’ll probably create a “2020” directory for the first con.

Huh, Mosen made an interesting point

[jesse_the_k]

about the con's name: why can't they say 'blind' out loud?

It is a shameful commentary on the ableism rampant in the mainstream tech press that while conferences like the Consumer Electronics Show get plenty of coverage, CSUN gets next to none even though there are estimates that one in five or even one in four people are disabled. There’s a lot of interest out there. In the podcast interview and indeed in a private email before it, I expressed my discomfort with the technology conference all about stuff that you and I, blind and low vision people might like to use been called Sight Tech Global.

To be fair, Ned isn’t the first to use this language. When I was a product manager in the tech industry, I had to attend Sight Village in the United Kingdom and SightCity in Frankfurt, and it made me feel very uncomfortable. I felt that my job was requiring me to compromise my values.

full transcript https://mosen.org/malp0139transcript/

Re: Huh, Mosen made an interesting point

[kestrell]

I saw the blurb for that in Top Tech Tidbits and, yeah, the semiotics of blindness is weird in that sighted people have a lot of trouble even uttering the word "blind." When I was at UMass Boston and professors were trying to tell me that they didn't want me in their classes, in all sorts of subtle ways, it was often pretty funny--to me--how many verbal contortions they would go through in order to *not* say the word "blind."

When I was a kid, I knew my eyesight was getting worse, and I tried to talk to my ophthalmologist about it, because I wanted to find out how to prepare, but he wouldn't even admit that my vision was getting worse, and my teacher from the Commission for the Blind wouldn't teach me braille, because they don't teach people with functional vision braille skills. So no one would even talk about being or becoming blind.

In my mind, this is why things related to blind and visually impaired people often have euphemistic names--the Lighthouse, for crying out loud?--because able-bodied people still treat blindness as such a curse, such a taboo, that they literally cannot say the word.

If you think people aren't still superstitious, if you think they still don't have taboos, all you have to do is examine the euphemisms, the outright inability most people have in using the word blind around a blind person, or applying the word blind to any group or "positive" event that is associated with being blind.