Minnesota man launches company to make digital life more inclusive
ST. LOUIS PARK, Minn. -- One in five Americans has a disability. For many of them, navigating the world can be tricky.
What you may not realize is it also makes navigating websites and apps almost impossible.
It's been 16 years since Dr. Belo Cipriani has actually seen a computer screen. He was assaulted by a group of young men while working in tech in California.
"They started hitting me, and my cause of blindness is retinol detachment, so I got kicked in the head so many times that my retinas detached," Cipriani said.
He lost all of his vision at age 26.
"It was shocking," he said.
It was also frustrating. Even though computers now have screen readers, most websites and apps are not compatible.
"I would say that often friends will meet up for lunch or dinner and they send me a link to a restaurant and I can't access their menu," he said. "Or I want to buy tickets to a concert and I want to submit payment and then like the button's not labeled. And so what happens is I hear 'button, button, button,' and I don't know what button I am pressing."
So Dr. Cipriani started Oleb Media, a digital inclusion company, to solve problems those kinds of problems.
For example, most restaurant websites show pictures of food, but the screen reader doesn't interpret photos. The solution? Simply write out text underneath that describes what's in the photos.
The Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (MRAC) is one of Oleb's clients.
"We actually want to break down barriers and make sure that our application process, our decision-making process, all of those things are as barrier-free as possible. And so that definitely includes the disability community," said MRAC's Kathy Mouacheupao.
Dr. Cipriani says that inclusion carries over to social media, where everyone can choose to add "alt text" to their posts to add photo descriptions.
"As a human being I just feel included, I feel part of the conversation," Cipriani said. "I feel like someone took a moment so that I could, or someone like me, could be part of this conversation."
Click here to visit Oleb Media's website if you're interested in making your website or mobile sites more inclusive.