[CR] | Global talk| From tiflohackers to wikitiflos
Tuesday, October 26th | 8:30 a.m. (UTC-5)
Dean Lermen
National Coordinator of People Organizations with Visual Limitation (CONALIVI)
The pandemic of the COVID-19 accelerated and deepened the exclusion of people with disabilities (PCD), especially that of blind people, with low vision, deaf and deafblindness. These groups had already faced negative discrimination and marginality of premodern, modern, and capitalist societies, and had generated subsistence and survival strategies.
In the field of human rights, international treaties were achieved, an incipient national legislative development, and insufficient public policies. Digital exclusion is an attack on the exercise of citizenship and the participation of PCDs in 21st-century societies, and it is no longer enough to hack a screen reader software or multiple high-cost applications to access a minimum of information Because the gap deepened and the digital barrier is an insurmountable wall.
Despite the Treaty of Marrakech, the development in Accessibility and Usability of the Web and artificial intelligence, the contents are not accessible, the PCDs have restricted their fundamental freedoms and their right to participate in public, political, social, economic life, educational, cultural, sports and recreational.
The solution is to undertake collaborative and cooperative projects, add, build from the outlook of open data, open science. Wikitiflos is an invitation to talk, it is a meeting on the Web of teachers, blind students, with low vision and deafblindness, their families, experts in accessibility and usability, and creators and producers of content. Wikitiflos is the product of a cooperative and collaborative exercise between national PCD organizations and international cooperation agencies (www.wikitiflos.net). Wikitiflos is the hope of a web that goes beyond accessibility and usability, it is autonomy, independence, freedom, and justice.