What's the "electronic curbcut effect"?
Dredging up some old web articles the other day found this gem, "Fueling the Creation of New Electronic Curbcuts."
An excerpt:
Television (TV) manufacturers in the U.S. will tell you that their caption decoders for the deaf wound up benefiting tens-of-millions more consumers than originally intended. As the electronic curb cut effect has shown in the past, televisions with decoders are simply better than those without. For example, captioning can enable TV viewers to:(Click http://www.accessiblesociety.org/topics/technology/eleccurbcut.htm to keep reading! It's a fun overview of accessbility and you might learn something!)
-search for and retrieve video content, by word, through the use of multimedia databases;
-listen to programs in silence while someone is sleeping;
-listen to programs in noisy environments like sports bars;
-watch their favorite program while talking on the telephone, without appearing rude to the person being spoken to;
-read more effectively, and at an earlier age, by enabling them to see the words being spoken at the same time they hear them (i.e. Sesame Street);
-Learn to read/speak a second language by displaying foreign words at the same time they are being spoken; and,
-Understand foreign programming through the use of native language captions.What follows is a listing of IT innovations, originally developed by, or in support of, people with disabilities that wound up benefiting everyone.