Global Accessibility Awareness Day: Here are all Alexa features you should know about | Tech News

Global Accessibility Awareness Day: Here are all Alexa features you should know about

Alexa has a Show and Tell feature tells the item that users are holding in their hands.

By: HT TECH
| Updated on: Aug 20 2022, 21:00 IST
Amazon Alexa has features for people with vision, hearing and speech related impairments.
Amazon Alexa has features for people with vision, hearing and speech related impairments. (Pixabay)
Amazon Alexa has features for people with vision, hearing and speech related impairments.
Amazon Alexa has features for people with vision, hearing and speech related impairments. (Pixabay)

Technology has revolutionised the way we live our lives. It has not only brought the world closer by reducing the barriers in communication, but it has also given us the mobility to control almost every aspect of our lives.

Thanks to technological advancements in the past couple of years, browsing the internet, communicating with friends and family using messaging and social media platforms and even exploring the world have become the second nature for us. However, accessibility-related barriers have prevented millions of people across the globe from using some of the basic functionality offered by modern technology.

Over the years, virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa have helped break this barrier by giving people with disabilities the accessibility and the freedom to control various facets of their daily lives.

And so on the eight observance of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which was launched back in 2012 to promote digital inclusion and accessibility for people with disabilities, we bring to you a list of all the accessibility features available in Alexa's portfolio:

Speech Settings

Speech settings are designed for people who have difficulty in speaking or pronouncing words. Amazon Alexa has a feature called ‘Tap to Alexa' that allows users to interact with Alexa by selecting on-screen tiles or by using an on-screen keyboard, instead of speaking.

Hearing Settings

These features are designed for people who have difficulty in hearing and thereby understanding the spoken words. Alexa has a bunch of features that allow people with such disabilities to interact with Amazon's virtual assistant and perform various tasks without hearing her response.

The Closed Captioning feature, for instance, shows captions for all the supported videos and movie trailers. The Alexa Captioning feature, on the other hand, allows users to see text captions of supported responses from Alexa in real time. Apart from these features, Alexa also has a Calling and Messaging Without Speech feature that allows users to view transcripts from their Alexa messages and see their contact list using the Alexa touch based features.

Vision Settings

In addition to features that provide greater accessibility to people with hearing and speech impairments, Alexa also has a host of features for people who have vision related issues. For instance, it has a Screen Magnifier feature that allows users to, well, magnify the screen using gestures.

Alexa also has a Colour Inversion feature that inverts values on all screens. Simply said, it turns back text on white background to white text on black background and vice versa.

In addition to this, it has a Colour Correction feature that modifies the screen colors to assist people with color blindness. The list includes Deuteranomaly, Protanomaly, and Tritanomaly. Alexa, and by extension Echo devices, also have a VoiceView Screen Reader feature that describes what users touch and interact with on the screen. Users can turn this feature on or off, adjust the reading speed and volume and feedback tone volume using this feature.

Lastly, the company rolled out a Show and Tell feature for Alexa last year which uses the camera available on the company's Echo Show range of smart displays to describe the item that users are holding in their hands.

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First Published Date: 21 May, 07:30 IST
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