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If you’re blind, you can literally turn the screen off and operate everything — do your e-mail, surf the Web, adjust settings, run apps — by tapping and letting the phone speak what you’re touching. You can also magnify the screen or reverse black for white (for better-contrast reading).

AssistiveTouch, is Apple’s accessibility team at its most creative.

To me, the most impressive part is that you can define your own gestures. In Settings->General->Accessibility, you can tap Create New Gesture to draw your own gesture right on the screen, using up to five fingers.

Websites such as Blogger4, Flickr5 and YouTube6 are totally reliant on user generated content, in the form of blogs, photos and videos respectively. How can these websites control the accessibility of their content? Content is created at such a rapid speed that it wouldn't be reasonable (or even possible) for any of these websites to police that content for accessibility.

Image- and photo-driven websites, such as Flickr, could request users insert alternative descriptions, either of their own or other people's photos. Ensuring this actually happens across the site though will be difficult to impossible to achieve.

Predictions There are three major factors that will shape web accessibility in the future: AJAX, user generated content and WCAG 2.0. The increased prominence of these factors could lead to some of the following: Accessibility will become less and less guideline-driven With the advent of new technology (such as AJAX), and the technology-neutral and vague nature of the new W3C guidelines (WCAG 2.0), accessibility is becoming less and less guideline driven. This means that employing accessibility experts is going to become more and more important for organisations as interpreting these guidelines correctly will become more and more difficult. Alternative accessible versions will become the norm Historically speaking, separate accessible versions were frowned on for both ethical and business reasons (see Separate text-only version? No thanks!7 for more on this). However, for the first time usability and accessibility are coming head-to-head with each other and rich interactive interfaces often can't be made fully accessible. In this instance, a separate version will have to be provided (but only after all other routes have been exhausted). User generated content is likely to offer poor accessibility Content created by users is becoming more and more commonplace on the web. This kind of content is being created at such a rapid rate that it's going to be impossible to police it for accessibility. JavaScript, PDF & Flash will no longer be thought of as 'evil' In WCAG 1.0, web managers and developers were basically told that their websites shouldn't rely on any of these three technologies. WCAG 2.0 on the other hand doesn't stipulate this, and rightly so as most assistive technologies can now support these technologies