Proudly Canadian
Double Tap was born in Canada, and so is a surprising amount of the technology we cover. On this page we cover the companies building the hardware, the organisations putting it into people’s hands, the advocates arguing with governments about it, and the listeners who tell us what actually works.
Canadian voices
Start here. Canadians talking about the technology they live with, and the Canadians who built it: a teacher in Vancouver, a blind gamer, an Ottawa engineer who built for his two sisters, a Toronto researcher who would not accept that a care home could refuse someone a power chair, and canes from Winnipeg whose cleverest features were invented by a blind man.
Braille in Canada
Canada has an unusually strong braille community, and a lot of it passes through this show. A two-hour live special, a reporter on his own relationship with the code, and a professor at UBC on the boy who invented it.
CNIB
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind is not only a service provider but increasingly a product maker in its own right, from talking kitchen appliances to the distribution of hardware across Canada.
Startups and innovation hubs
Canadian founders and solo developers building accessible products, and the infrastructure starting to grow around them.
HumanWare
Drummondville, Quebec. HumanWare has been building braille displays, note takers and audiobook players for decades, and it turns up in the Double Tap archive more often than any other Canadian company.
Advocacy and policy
Technology only reaches people when the law, the standards and the training catch up. These are the Canadians arguing for that, and the ones who stopped waiting and built something instead.
Landing in Canada
Tech that arrived in Canada on its own timetable, sometimes years after everywhere else, and usually only once someone here pushed for it.
