An exciting alliance has resulted in a development quite beneficial to the deaf and hard of hearing. This alliance is between AT&T and Blue Jeans Network.
AT&T and Blue Jeans have announced a joint video collaboration offering that extends cloud-based services to business and mobility customers. AT&T Video Meetings with Blue Jeans will host sessions on desktops, mobile devices, or conference rooms equipped for video. The collaboration with Blue Jeans Network adds to AT&T’s growing portfolio of mobility solutions.
Blue Jeans Network announced it has added key features to enhance its video conferencing service to make it more accessible to customers with disabilities such as visual and hearing impairment. The first cloud-based video collaboration solution to make strides towards greater accessibility for customers, Blue Jeans’ web application, iOS App, and Android App have all been enhanced to make the service available to a wider range of customers with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these.
“Enhancing accessibility is paramount to our mission to make it possible for anyone to collaborate more effectively anytime, anywhere, and from practically any device,” said Stu Aaron, Chief Commercial Officer at Blue Jeans Network. “As businesses and educational institutions of all sizes and shapes around the world are deploying Blue Jeans we believe that our enhanced accessibility will help ensure that no one is left out. We are taking a proactive step to be more inclusive to all of our customers and intend to continue to lead the industry with accessibility features.”
Beneficial to all customers, the increased accessibility is especially valuable in the education sector as it expands access to classroom resources for all students and opens new avenues of communication with instructors and peers for greater learning opportunities.
Enhanced Accessibility allows for the following:
- Distance Learning: Blue Jeans’ enhanced services opens up the possibility for distance learning to even more users. With Blue Jeans, more students are able to remotely gain access to lectures and classroom resources no matter where they are located.
- Interpreter Services: With Blue Jeans visual collaboration services, those with deafness or hearing loss are able to invite an interpreter into the meeting to help facilitate the discussion.
- Compatibility with screen readers: Blue Jeans’ enhanced services are now compatible with standard screen readers such as VoiceOver on iOS and OSX platforms, TalkBack on Android devices and NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access) for Windows platform.
Blue Jeans is making enhancements to the service based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and the 21st Century Communications & Video Accessibility Act requirements in order to expand Blue Jeans’ accessibility to customers with disabilities.
Paraphrased from: //bit.ly/1z5kVVj
Claude Stout, Executive Director, TDI said, “TDI applauds AT&T for collaborating with Blue Jeans to introduce this exciting new video capability for those who are deaf and hard of hearing and using sign language or speech reading. It reflects AT&T’s genuine commitment in today’s changing times toward meeting the communication needs in a full, accessible world for its constituents who converse in American Sign Language or speech-reading. We call on other companies to follow AT&T’s example in building a more accessible future for all Americans. We ask that those who try out the Blue Jeans product let both AT&T and Blue Jeans know how well it works for them for various daily life activities.”
This doesn’t just benefit deaf and hard of hearing business customers; it also benefits students in colleges also, as this makes long distance learning via video conferencing possible. Not only does this break down the barriers to communication, it also does so for distance.
For more information on Blue Jeans’ new accessibility features, please visit: //bluejeans.com/features/accessibility.