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, 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.