Service and supports for people with disabilities are those government or other institutional services and supports specifically provided to enable people who have disabilities to participate in society and community life. Some such services and supports are mandated or required by law, some are assisted by technologies that have made it easier to provide the service or support while others are commercially available not only to persons with disabilities, but to everyone who might make use of them.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is intended to be easy to read in its source code form. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.
Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, as well as an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. As of 2022, Google Translate supports 133 languages at various levels; it claimed over 500 million total users as of April 2016, with more than 100 billion words translated daily, after the company stated in May 2013 that it served over 200 million people daily.
DECtalk was a speech synthesizer and text-to-speech technology developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1983, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, whose source-filter algorithm was variously known as KlattTalk or MITalk.
Jack Patrick Dorsey is an American Internet entrepreneur, philanthropist, and programmer, who is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc., as well as co-founder, principal executive officer and chairperson of Block, Inc., which is the developer of the Square financial services platform. He is also on the board of directors of Bluesky Social. As of October 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $3.1 billion.
Siri is the digital assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, audioOS, and visionOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Internet services. With continued use, it adapts to users' individual language usages, searches, and preferences, returning individualized results.
WhatsApp is an instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices, and can be accessed from computers. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to sign up. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client.
Duolingo is an American educational technology company that produces learning apps and provides language certification.
Sean Rad is an American entrepreneur and co-founder of the dating app Tinder. Rad launched Tinder in 2012 and by 2014 the company was recording one billion "swipes" a day.
Jan Koum is a Ukrainian-American billionaire businessman and computer programmer. He is the co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for US$19.3 billion. According to Forbes, he has an estimated net worth of US$15.2 billion as of October 2023, making him one of the richest people in the world. Koum was ranked 44th on the Forbes' list of richest Americans in 2023 with a net worth of $15.1 billion.
Brian Acton is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. Acton is the executive chairman of the Signal Technology Foundation, which he co-founded with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018. As of January 10, 2022, Acton also serves as interim CEO of Signal Messenger LLC.
Google Play Books, formerly Google eBooks, is an ebook digital distribution service operated by Google, part of its Google Play product line. Users can purchase and download ebooks and audiobooks from Google Play, which offers over five million titles, with Google claiming it to be the "largest ebooks collection in the world". Books can be read on a dedicated Books section on the Google Play website, through the use of a mobile app available for Android and iOS, through the use of select e-readers that offer support for Adobe Digital Editions, through a web browser and reading via Google Home. Users may also upload up to 2,000 ebooks in the PDF or EPUB file formats. Google Play Books is available in 75 countries.
Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company based in New York City. It was founded by Oren and Roni Frank in 2012. Talkspace users have access to licensed therapists through the website or mobile app on iOS and Android. Talkspace has been criticized for making questionable claims about its effectiveness, compromised user privacy, posted fake reviews to improve its rating in an app store, and uses freelance therapists of uncertain qualifications.
Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Google Docs is accessible via an internet browser as a web-based application and is also available as a mobile app on Android and iOS and as a desktop application on Google's ChromeOS.
Bumble is an online dating and networking application launched in 2014. Profiles of potential matches are displayed to users, who can "swipe left" to reject a candidate or "swipe right" to indicate interest. In heterosexual matches, only female users can make the first contact with matched male users, while in homosexual matches either person can send a message first. The app is a product of Bumble Inc.
Mogul is a global diversity recruitment company, founded by American entrepreneurs Tiffany Pham and David Pham.
ClassDojo is an educational technology company. It connects primary school teachers, students and families through communication features, such as a feed for photos and videos from the school day, and messaging that can be translated into more than 35 languages. It also enables teachers to note feedback on students' skills and creates a portfolio for students, so that families can be aware of school activities outside of meeting with teachers.
Oswald Labs is a Dutch-Indian based accessibility technology company that builds products for individuals with disabilities. It specializes in enterprise web accessibility, offers smartphone apps, and also runs a startup accelerator. It was established in 2016 by Anand Chowdhary, Nishant Gadihoke and Mahendra Raghuwanshi after their product, Oswald Extension, won an event at the AngelHack hackathon in New Delhi.
Cliff Weitzman is an Israeli-American entrepreneur and the founder of Speechify Text To Speech software. In 2017, Weitzman was named to Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30 list. Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate. He could not read as a child.
Live Transcribe is a smartphone application to get realtime captions developed by Google for the Android operating system. Development on the application began in partnership with Gallaudet University. It was publicly released as a free beta for Android 5.0+ on the Google Play Store on February 4, 2019. As of early 2023 it had been downloaded over 500 million times. The app can be installed from an .apk file by sideloading and it will launch, but the actual transcription functionality is disabled, requiring creation of an account with Google.
