I’ve been blind since birth and rely on my screen reader to ‘see’ online content for me. This wonderful assistive technology turns text and images into speech or Braille for the visually impaired. But it can’t read subtitles on videos or interpret images unless the alternative or ‘alt’ text (a short visual description) has been filled in by the person who uploaded it. My friend hadn’t done that on his TikTok video, so I tried to figure it out for myself. His hashtags give me a flavour - someth

Uruguay doesn’t often find itself on the international stage, save for wine and soccer. Yet despite sharing a border with Brazil, the country second-worst-hit by COVID-19, this small nation is managing to successfully combat a virus that has brought global giants to their knees. Latin America is currently one of the regions most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Argentina and Brazil, the countries bordering Uruguay, are seeing increases in cases daily. In Argentina, despite strict measures tak

The Peruvian Poor Can’t Breathe in the Pandemic At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Peruvian hospitals were on the verge of collapse, patients were lying in corridors for want of beds, and people were dying in the streets due to shortages of oxygen. Peru’s 32 million people are the worst hit per capita in the world, with almost 800,000 cases and more than 32,000 deaths since the pandemic started. The week of Sept. 23, the Ministry of Health reported more than 11,000 new cases and 185 dea

For more than 200 days, the citizens of Buenos Aires have lived in lockdown. Yet despite enduring one of the world’s longest quarantines, Argentina on Monday became just the fifth country to reach one million confirmed cases of Covid-19. With the end still out of sight, residents of the coastal city are counting not just the financial cost of the pandemic but the deep psychological one too. An initial 10-day general national quarantine was decreed by the Argentine government on March 20, but i

• The visually impaired are struggling to shop online independently during the pandemic due to visual barriers and inaccessible user experiences. • Generic product descriptions, unhelpful images, and an aesthetically pleasing user experience to the average eye aren't compatible with the assistive technologies used by the visually impaired. • When these images and text fail to work with screen readers, screen magnifiers, and other technologies, important details are lost. • While many online sto

Once a lawyer by profession, Spanish painter Cris de Diego never thought she would dedicate herself to art. A lifelong lover of museums, she used to enjoy artworks from afar. But when her visual disability threatened to get in the way of her passion, she knew it was time to act. “At age 10, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and at 21 years, because of this disease, I began to lose my sight,” said de Diego in a recent interview. With an unwaveringly cheerful tone of voice, de Diego explained

Thousands of visually impaired people have been left exposed to COVID-19 because of flaws in Spain's official tracking app, it has been claimed. RadarCOVID, which was launched at the end of June, is not accessible on an iPhone to people with sight problems. Spain has more than 72,000 people classified as visually impaired and critics say it puts everyone at more risk. "It's not just about preventing the blind from getting the virus, but also preventing the rest of the world from getting it,"

Crossing the street has always been an odyssey for me. I’ve been totally blind since birth, so the only thing that allows me to get my bearings in this situation are the sounds of vehicles. But with the coronavirus pandemic, and the lack of acoustic traffic lights in Colonia, Uruguay, where I live, this simple task for most people becomes really complex ― albeit not impossible ― for me. One day recently, I was walking on the sidewalk following the wall as a reference and as a way to prevent me

I’m Visually Impaired. I Don’t Want Things to Go Back to Normal. This pandemic is forcing society to make changes that should’ve been implemented a long time ago This year has been full of surprises and changes for everyone because of the pandemic. Yet, as a visually impaired person, not all of these changes have been bad for me. Before the pandemic, going to a restaurant and reading a menu independently seemed difficult, if not impossible. I am totally blind, and unless the menu is in Braill