Education Policy, Business and Technology

Using the Cloud to Improve Access for the Disabled

Campus Technology: Technology now plays such an integral role in our lives that we tend to take it for granted. People with disabilities, however, don't have that luxury. In fact, unless society makes a concerted effort to ensure that technology is inclusive, we risk isolating people with disabilities. A new project run by Raising the Floor, a consortium of more than 60 academic institutions, businesses and non-governmental organizations, hopes to level the playing field. The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), as the initiative is known, will use a cloud-based service to automatically configure internet-connected devices to meet the needs of individual users with disabilities. As the GPII site avows, the goal is to build "an on-demand, personalized, accessible on-ramp to the internet."

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