Minnesota man's digital inclusion company fights for access for all
MINNEAPOLIS -- One in five Americans has a disability. As you would imagine, that means navigating the world can be tricky. What you may not realize is it also makes navigating websites and apps almost impossible.
One Minnesota man is showing all of us how to help.
It's been 16 years since 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 retinal detachment, so I got kicked in the head so many times that my retinas detached," Cipriani said.
He lost all of his vision at 26.
"It was shocking," he said.
And it was frustrating. Even though computers now have screen readers, many websites and apps are not fully compatible.
"I would say that often friends want to meet up for lunch or dinner and they send me a link to a restaurant and I can't access their menu," Cipriani said. "Or I want to buy tickets to a concert and I want to submit payment and then the button's not labeled and so what happens is I hear 'button, button, button,' and I don't know which button I am pressing."
So Cipriani used his education and background to help his current situation. He started OLEB, a digital inclusion company to solve problems like this.
"Once you are aware of the barriers I think it just feels like our responsibility and human decency to try and eliminate as many barriers as possible," Kathy Mouacheupao said.
Mouacheupao is a proud customer of OLEB. She runs the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and their website is now fully accessible.
"We want to actually 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," she said.
Cipriani said that inclusion carries over to social media, where everyone can choose to alt edit their posts to write photo descriptions.
"As a human being, I just feel included, I feel part of the conversation. I feel that someone took a moment to make sure that that I could, or someone like me, could be part of this conversation," he said.
Cipriani is most certainly giving us all something to talk about.
Cipriani also focuses on making podcasts accessible for the hearing impaired. If you'd like to learn more about making a website or app more inclusive, click here.
