When the Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri designed what was probably the first working model of a typewriter in 1808, he wanted to make it easier for his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, to communicate with the outside world.

More than a hundred years later, in 1932, the American Association of the Blind (AFB) would introduce the "talking book" to give visually impaired people access to literature.

It was the beginning of the modern audio book.

These are just two examples in which innovations for a supposedly few have fundamentally changed the communication of many.

Natalia Wenzel Warkentin

Editor on duty at FAZ.NET.

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90 years later, young talents meet app developers at Apple's developer academy in Naples to make their products even more accessible for people with disabilities.

"Accessibility, access and participation for people with disabilities is not just a trend for Apple," says Sarah Herrlinger, who is responsible for the topic globally at the company.

It is already considered at the beginning of each development phase: “Our first accessibility team started back in 1985 and looks at every product that we develop from this point of view at an early stage.”

Almost 300 million people in the world are blind or partially sighted.

Another 360 million identify as deaf or hard of hearing.

Statistics say that about one in ten people is also color blind.

Overall, researchers assume that around one billion people live with a disability - that's 12.5 percent of humanity, probably the largest minority in the world.

In times of demographic change, these numbers are likely to increase.

Participation through smart devices

As early as 2009, Apple introduced the Voice Over reading function on the iPhone.

After positive feedback from the blind community, it was extended to other products.

When the company introduced the first Apple Watch in 2014, it was also equipped with Voice Over, making it the first wearable that also enabled people with visual impairments to participate.

In 2020, when the coronavirus sent the world into a collective lockdown, Apple launched a feature that gave tactile or audible feedback on how far away other people were standing.

At that time, the obligation to wear masks posed great challenges for both visually impaired and hearing impaired people - it was now much more difficult to recognize people and to understand them acoustically with a piece of cloth in front of your mouth.

Christian Erfurt, co-founder of the Danish app "Be my eyes", works closely with Apple and the students in Naples when it comes to making the world more accessible for blind and partially sighted people.

In 2012, during a start-up event, he met his co-founder Hans Jørgen Viberg, who is visually impaired himself.

Together they founded "Be my eyes".

The idea: if visually impaired people have difficulties in everyday life, they should not always be dependent on friends and family.

Why not spread the help over several shoulders?