English language

How to pronounce visually in English?

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thank you the world is not designed to
be inclusive the world is designed for
the convenience of the majority it is
designed for practicality every product
you use every place you visit every
single piece of the world that you
interact with is meant to exclude a
certain population to make it easy to
create so we call them the edge cases
now there is a group that's always the
edge case that's always excluded from
everything that we as a society create
and they are called people with
disabilities now let's do a quick show
of hands here how many of you arrived
here by train today or have used the
train in the past week to go to work to
do something yeah now during your
journey how many of you stopped to think
how you would use the touchscreen ticket
machines in the station if you couldn't
see or how you would hear the
announcements in the Train if you
couldn't hear or how much more difficult
could the journey get if you had to call
for special help every time you wanted
to get on or get off a train it's not
just these there are hundreds of small
interactions like this that cause
disabled people to lead a very limited
and dependent life I mean if you are a
disabled person in our society today
it's a big deal if you can plan a
last-minute trip anywhere outside with
your friends on a nice day like this now
we must think if this inconvenience is
because of their disability or is it
because of our inability to build a more
inclusive world for them well
if you haven't really thought about any
of this I don't blame you because in the
hustle of everyday life it's very easy
to miss what you can't see I was exactly
where you are a year ago completely
clueless about what it means to be a
disabled person in our society today I
want to take you back with me to my
hometown Chennai India about a year ago
I was invited to talk at a blind school
to a group of motivated sharp high
schoolers the topic of the talk was
different opportunities with emerging
technologies and how every job in the
future will be about problem-solving at
the end of the talk I asked him a very
simple question what kind of problems
would you like to solve the answer that
I got back from the crowd was very
similar they all said they wanted to be
able to read independently they wanted
to be able to do their homework
independently they wanted to go out
independently they just wanted to be
like every other normal kid out there
but independence was their biggest
struggle and they were constantly trying
to find ways to solve that the talk and
it's aftermath stuck with me for a very
long time I felt that if independence
was such a big struggle for these kids
then I should probably attempt to do
something about it so around this time I
got back in touch with an old friend of
mine who also happens to be an
industrial designer when we spoke about
the talk and the feedback that I got
from the students he felt equally
compelled to do something about it
we decided that we could solve this
problem through the perspective of
design thinking and the first key
principle of design thinking is to begin
with the users and so we began by
talking to hundreds of visually impaired
people from across the world
all walks of life the main idea behind
these interactions was to understand
what it means for a visually impaired
person what independence means to a
visually impaired person we would spend
entire days with them just trying to
understand their needs better we'd start
the day with a core assumption and just
spend the whole day trying to validate
it every day from this phase felt like
an episode from the Mythbusters for
example for the longest time we wondered
of visually impaired people use
smartphones I mean how can they write
most modern smartphones come with
touchscreens and they have no buttons on
them we couldn't be more wrong during
our research we found out that visually
impaired people are very adept
smartphone users and most modern
smartphones including the ones in your
pocket have very sophisticated screen
readers in them so this was you know we
were doing this every day for about six
months at the end of which we had over a
hundred hours of interviews with
visually impaired people we had two key
insights from this exercise the first
was for most visually impaired people
independence meant access to information
it's kind of obvious when you think
about it because 90% of the information
processed by the human brain is visual
so imagine if someone comes along and
cuts off 90% of the information source
to your brain life would get pretty hard
to cope with right
the second key insight that we got was
that it's impractical to expect the
system and the infrastructure around us
to change there are only that many
Braille displays that you can put
everywhere so we realized that we must
solve this problem from a different
perspective a paradigm shift one that
empowers visually impaired people to
access this very
visual world but what can this paradigm
shift be we realized quite early on that
to find the best possible solution we
must involve visually impaired people
not just in the research but also
allowed them to be part of the solution
through the process of co-creation the
co-creation process is the second key
principle of Design Thinking let me walk
you through a typical co-creation
session we'd have about 10 to 15
visually impaired people from different
age groups different professions at the
beginning of the session we'd give them
a problem and we would allow them to
come up with the solution let me tell
you it's exhilarating to see people who
have the problem solve it for themselves
the creative energy that visually
impaired people put into this exercise
was phenomenal during these sessions
we'd also give them prototypes that we
built to get their feedback based on
what he told us during previous sessions
so about after about 8 to 10 sessions
and about 20 different prototypes later
we felt we had the perfect solution one
that allows visually impaired people to
access the world on their own terms and
that solution was artificial
intelligence
now throughout history AI has been more
hype than reality every other decade
will have people telling us that you
know the robots are going to take over
the world and there's going to be super
intelligence and all that so yai
and why now over the past few years the
way we interact with the machines around
us has changed dramatically the current
mobile revolution that we live in right
now has insured two things first the
abundance of data just last year alone
humans took 1.2
Trillian images through a smartphone
that's 1.2 followed by 12 zeroes and
computers have gotten both smaller and
faster to help us make sense of it all
this is especially true when it comes to
recognizing images we now have tools
that can help a visually impaired person
extract images extract information from
images as accurately as a human and this
technology is being used to make
self-driving cars to automate big you
know to automate work at big industries
and so on and now we're using it to help
visually impaired people so how does AI
help a visually impaired person the
first problem that AI solves for a
visually impaired person is helping them
read text now imagine you're a visually
impaired person you walk into a
restaurant you want to have a nice meal
all by yourself
but you can't read so when the waiter
hands you an inaccessible menu card what
you can do today is with your smartphone
take a photo of it and it would read it
out to you not just menu cards you could
use it to read this place at a train
station the letters that you get from a
municipality or you know just enjoy a
nice evening newspaper over the past few
years air has also gotten really good at
reading handwriting so the Christmas
card that you get you can read that -
all of this helps make the text in the
visual world more accessible but visual
information is a lot more than text it
involves people objects and so on
AI can help describe the world in great
detail with AI a visually impaired
person can just walk into a crowded bar
take a look around and find where his
friend is sitting and walk right up to
him just as easily as a person who can
see with tools that we have today
ai is already helping people live a more
independent and productive life just
last week we had a user who said that he
was
able to help his you know sighted boss
install a version of Windows on his PC
we had a visually impaired mother tell
us that she was able to go ahead and
help her son with his home with the
homework for the very first time all of
these people are now accessing
information on their own terms when they
wanted and how they wanted if there are
two things that I want you to take away
from today it's this first the world we
live in is not accessible and this
alienation is only going to increase as
societies get older and as the world
moves to a more visual form of
information exchange it's also
impractical to expect the infrastructure
around us to change secondly the best
way to empower a visually impaired
person is to give them the tools to
access the world on their own terms and
AI is already helping us get there I'm
super excited for a future in which AI
when applied in a meaningful way can
have a truly positive impact on the
world
AI can be a biggest strength when we
measure its value by not how powerful it
is but by how much it empowers people
but the onus is still on us the makers
the designers the engineers the
architects in the crowd to make the
world a more inclusive place
accessibility should not just be a
feature an option or an afterthought it
has to be at the very foundation of
everything that we do as a society
because humanity truly moves forward
only when it's everybody in and nobody
out thank you
you

thank you the world is not designed to

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How to pronounce visually in English?

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