Tech innovations boost digital accessibility, aid the disabled

The accident that changed the course of 36-year-old Cai Yongbin's life came in a blinding flash. All of six years old then and unable to resist his worldly curiosity, Cai decided to find out what the contents of a bucket he had come across on a construction site were.

In that container, in his hometown of Dongguan in Guangdong province, was white lime, and as the young Cai lifted the container, its contents poured out, right into his eyes.

Despite the best efforts of doctors, Cai lost his vision. A life of perennial darkness awaited.

Fast forward 30 years, and a dozen members of a team that works for Cai sit at desks in an office block in Dongguan, each wearing headphones and each furiously tapping away at keyboards.

They are all IT engineers, and most of them, like Cai, are visually impaired. It is their aural skills that they employ to closely listen to computer codes through the headphones.

"The world's a big place full of choices," said Cai, chief executive of Etong Information Technology. Etong, shares the same pronunciation with Yitong, which means togetherness in Chinese.

"Being visually impaired doesn't mean you're destined to spend your life working as a masseuse or in the music industry," the young CEO added.

Two of Etong's IT engineers, Li Hongli and Li Liancai, know exactly the challenges their boss faced as he embarked on his career. Li Hongli was told to forget about preparing for an undergraduate entrance exam in computer science because exam papers for the visually impaired were not available.

Li Liancai worked as a masseur but decided to throw himself into studying computer programming, before eventually landing a job in the IT industry.

Cai recalls the early years as a tough and gloomy journey, which ended when he attended a special school in Shenzhen, where, at the age of 13, he was introduced to software that allowed him to hear what was on the computer screens. That was in 2001, when desktop computers were relatively new to China and were by today's standards highly rudimentary. But for Cai and his peers, the machines transcended mere utility and became an extension of their senses.

"When I was a teenager, China got the internet, and screen reader software was developed, so computers opened up a completely new world of information for me," he said.

During Cai's early learning endeavors as a teenager, he first tried to scan textbooks, relying on screen readers. However, the technology lacked more advanced optical character recognition capabilities and he found himself at a loss when he encountered graphics and diagrams.

He contacted companies working with the technology, urging them to make their products more suitable for the visually impaired. However, the appeals largely fell on deaf ears.

At the age of 16, he decided to teach himself information sciences and downloaded myriad programming e-books from the internet, listening to them using software that turned text into audio.

Unable to see keyboards, the visually impaired IT aficionados relied on rote learning, noting the position of each key until it became ingrained in their memories. To commit code to memory, Cai often listened to a segment repeatedly, sometimes hundreds of times, until he mastered the material.

In 2014, by now in his mid 20s, and with his programming skills advancing, Cai joined the Information Accessibility Research Association in Shenzhen and became an information accessibility engineer.

His work at the association involved accessibility testing on internet products, reporting issues and proposing accessibility improvements.

"I opted for this role hoping to enable more individuals like me to make the most of the internet."

In 2018, he set up Etong Technology. Wu Zhenwen, the company's co-founder and a cousin of Cai, revealed that the staff are from diverse backgrounds, with 70 percent of them being engineers who are visually impaired, most recruited through referrals or drawn by Etong's growing reputation.

IT empowerment

In pre-e-commerce days, few visually impaired individuals could independently buy basic necessities, hampered by the difficulty of selecting products and not knowing how much cash they had, let alone whether what they were holding was real cash or not.

On one occasion Cai, thinking he was buying soda, bought beer, a mistake that may at first blush seem trivial, but could have had severe consequences, given that Cai is allergic to alcohol. This episode underlined for him the importance of easing the way for those with disabilities wanting to shop online to access e-commerce platforms.

The imperative of such a move is underlined by the fact that in 2022 about 29 million visually impaired people were registered in the country.

"With electronic products, the trend is toward touchscreens, but these are useless for the visually impaired because they cannot see what such screens display," said Cai.

Although the e-commerce platform Taobao provides accessibility features for visually impaired users, its image-to-speech conversion capabilities used to be limited earlier. Six years ago, Taobao's owner Alibaba worked with Etong to introduce optical character recognition software to fill this gap.

Its introduction has helped hundreds of thousands of people. Today as many as 300,000 visually impaired users shop on Taobao and Tmall every day.

At one time, the visually impaired could not use music software to search for songs, Li Hongli said, but with recently developed software they now can. Such innovations are vital to build confidence and independence for the visually impaired, he added.

"For example, slider verification poses a challenge for the visually impaired because it requires assistance. By working with product teams to tackle these issues we have enhanced the independence of the visually impaired."

With technological advances, visually impaired consumers can enjoy more digitally driven services in growing sectors such as food delivery and transportation, allowing them to lead more independent lives.

Eleven months ago, China adopted a law on accessibility to new technology that calls on the owners of internet websites and mobile apps in fields such as social communication, lifestyle shopping, healthcare and transportation to adopt accessible-website design standards.

Chinese technology leaders such as Huawei and Xiaomi are now introducing screen recognition features similar to those developed by Etong and drawing on domestic models to provide localized accessibility support such as text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionality.

Cai eschews the term disabled while talking of himself and continues to push and break boundaries — one of his team's weekend pastimes being to climb mountains near their office.

"By building up digital accessibility, technology will progressively diminish the disparity between visually impaired individuals and sighted individuals," Cai said.

"Ultimately both groups will have access to the same information in their minds, albeit through diverse methods and channels, something echoed in the togetherness that our company's name evokes."

Hu Xinyue and Kuang Hanying contributed to this story.

houchenchen@chinadaily.com.cn