Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2022
Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2022
The third Thursday of May each year is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. At this GAAD2022, Kenichiro Yoshida, Chairman, President and CEO of Sony Group Corporation delivered a message, and Sony Group companies around the world conducted various initiatives to raise awareness of accessibility.
Initiatives by Sony Group Companies
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) reflects on the progress that was made on its accessibility efforts over the past year in this SIE.Blog. The video shows six accessibility experts from PlayStation and external consultants discussing their perspective on accessibility in video games. SIE continually highlights the importance of accessibility and inclusion in gaming all year round.
Since empathy among employees is of primary importance in improving accessibility, individual companies organized a variety of in-house events and employee awareness programs.
At Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), a virtual conversation for employees was held with GAAD founder, Joe Devon, and SPE Executive Director and GAAD Board Member, Nadia Ichinomiya. The recorded archive was shared not only with SPE employees but also for the entire group along with Japanese subtitles. As a developer, Joe Devon talked about the fact that all users have different abilities and there would be a huge significance to creating accessible technologies and platforms. The messages delivered by Joe Devon was inspiring for employees involved in Sony's diverse businesses.
Online talk event to employees(Clockwise from top left: sign language interpreter, Nadya Ichinomiya, Joe Devon)
Sony Corporation's online event to demonstrate the various accessibility features built into Sony products took place at its US office. Explanations were accompanied by demonstrations of TV subtitle settings and camera screen reader functions.*1 For group employees that participated from the North American region and other parts of the world, it was an opportunity to fully realize the importance of accessibility functions, by seeing the demos of accessibility features of the products.
Demonstrating accessibility features at the event for employees- *1The Screen Reader function is limited to the North American model of the Alpha 7 IV (ILCE-7M4) (when set to English) and is only supported for some settings and operations during movie playback.
At Sony Financial Group, Sony Life Insurance showed how it has added features to its mailed documents that make it easier for elderly and customers with visual impairments to understand the information they contain. For particularly important documents, it has introduced "Uni-Voice" audio codes and guide notches to help users locate the codes by touch and has enlarged the fonts used for titles such as Information on Insurance Coverage so that the elderly can read them more easily.
Left: Audio bar code and guide notch. Right: Larger fonts make text easier to read (Envelope on left)
In addition, we released a new video and interviews that introduce Sony's products and contents that pursue accessibility.
