The American Foundation for the Blind announced Apple among its four honorees to receive a Helen Keller Achievement Award later this June, recognizing the company's contribution to accessibility with VoiceOver.
Apple is the only tech company among the nominees, which also include an actor portraying the blind superhero Daredevil, a visually impaired musician and a pharmaceutical firm that introduced a new treatment for the circadian rhythm disorder.
The group's President & CEO Carl R. Augusto noted, "We are honoring accomplished individuals and companies for their success in improving quality of life for people with vision loss either through groundbreaking innovation or inspirational achievement that changes perceptions about what it means to be visually impaired."
Apple was specifically noted for its work on VoiceOver, an interactive screen reader the company began bundling on its iPods, iOS devices and Macs for free.
The same group previously recognized Apple with an Access Award in 2009 for its pioneering engineering work to make its products accessible to everyone.
Accessibility-Gate, 2014
Last year, Christina Farr of Reuters published a critical article that stated "Apple hasn't been a steady champion" in accessibility, including a selective quote of Apple's chief executive Tim Cook that implied that Apple was sort of indifferent to the needs of its disabled users.
In reality however, Apple has actually pushed accessibility features far ahead of its competitors, particularly in stark contrast to Google's Android. "Apple has done more for accessibility than any other company to date"
In response, Mark A. Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, castigated the media's attacks on Apple's accessibility work as "inaccurate assertions have been fueled by a provocative and poorly reported article from the Reuters news service."
Riccobono also noted that beyond "commitment to making iTunes and iTunes U accessible to blind users, Apple has gone far beyond the scope of that original agreement and made the vast majority of its products accessible to the blind."
He added, "Apple has done more for accessibility than any other company to date, and we have duly recognized this by presenting the company with at least two awards (including our annual Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award) and publicly praising it whenever the opportunity arises."
Stevie Wonder praised Steve Jobs for Apple's accessibility efforts
In September 2011, blind from birth performer Stevie Wonder called out Steve Jobs during a show, telling his audience, "I want you all to give a hand to someone that you know whose health is very bad at this time. His company took the challenge in making his technology accessible to everyone. In the spirit of caring and moving the world forward, Steve Jobs."
He added, "because there's nothing on the iPhone or iPad that you can do that I can't do. As a matter of fact, i can be talking to you, you can be looking at me, and I can be doing whatever I need to do and you don't even know what I'm doing!"