Image Source: Visual China

Beijing, June 21 (TMTPOST) —  Alibaba has improved accessibility services on 15 of its mobile applications, according to the director of Alibaba’s Committee of Information Accessibility at the 4th Technology Accessibility Development Conference held in Shenzhen.

Alibaba pledged to continue to improve accessibility services and increase standards to serve the elderly and users with disabilities.

The 15 applications include Taobao, Eleme, Hema, Xianyu, Youku and Ding Talk, which cover use scenes such as online shopping, dining, entertainment and social networking. These mobile applications served millions of elderly users and thousands of people with visual impairment, Wu Zeming, President of Alibaba’s Committee of Information Accessibility said.

“Taobao’s elderly mode will zoom in the fonts by 1.375 times, which is the biggest font size that we can do to match the user interfact,” Zhang Yiyuan, the technical director of Alibaba’s Committee of Information Accessibility said. “Many elderly users find it inconvenient to type on smartphones. So we put voice input at the most obvious place on the front page. We want to make sure they can use the voice input function in most scenarios.”

Wu said that Alibaba will continue to invest in improving accessibility services for the elderly and users with disabilities so as to make the mobile applications on their smartphones usable and increasingly useful. It is said that Taobao’s elderly mode will adopt the OCR text recognition feature later this year to help elderly users quickly acquire key information on images on the Internet.

In November last year, Alibaba, Ant Group and other six companies established the Information Accessibility Technology and Intellectual Property Sharing Work Group under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to share innovations and technologies that can help people with disabilities. The first batch of technologies that were shared by the work group include 28 technologies, 11 of which were provided by Alibaba. The technologies include hand gesture control, eyeball tracking and voice command.