Ability Magazine
My Name is Paul Albano, I'm with Canon USA.
At Canon we are driven by the corporate philosophy of "Kyousei"
which means "living and working together for the common good".
That philosophy drives all of our activities at Canon
from the way in which we design our products
to our relationships with our customers
and communities in which we operate in
as well as our management structure.
At Canon we strive to design technology
that's accessible to the widest range of users
regardless of their abilities.
In our office equipment environment,
we strive to design technology and solutions
that will allow people to do their work
with great ease of use and great efficiency
so that technology can be enjoyed
and used by people of all abilities.
Our founder, Dr. Mitarai,
shortly after we introduced our first camera
we introduced the world's first indirect X-ray camera
which is used to help diagnose
certain diseases such as tuberculosis
In the 1970's we were actually a distributor
of certain accessibility products
We actually manufactured a product called "Cannon Communicator"
and we were a distributor
of a product called the "Optacon".
Today we're designing multifunctional office equipment
that will allow people to perform their daily work
much more easily and efficiently
and by removing many of the common barriers
that they may experience from office products.
For example, UI screens,
which do not have any tactile markings or indications
are able to now provide access
to the user interface using things
such as voice guidance or voice navigation.
We're able to apply things
such as red label kits to our products
which help folks with low vision
to identify key components of the system.
Most of our machines also can work
or integrate with screen readers
and screen magnification software
so many of many device drivers
and utilities can be accessed from a remote location,
or from a desktop.
So these are just some examples of how we strive to make
our technology accessible for people in an office setting,
allow people to do their work
much more independently.