Disability Access News

recently attended an event, Techshare India 2008, which was India's first technology event to promote accessible technology for people with disabilities. It was amazing to see some of the products, standards, and technologies that were showcased to empower people with disabilities. We've talked about some of them in this issue. Most of these were aimed at making things more accessible for disabled people, thereby empowering them to become more independent. In a country like ours, where nearly 6% of the population is disabled, which amounts to roughly 6 million people, these technologies are definitely a blessing in disguise.

But even more interesting is the revelation that some of these technologies and standards can impact a far wider number of people than the physically challenged alone. Take for instance a website. It doesn't take too much effort to make a website more accessible for the disabled. The website developer simply has to conform to a few standards, and pay a little more attention to the user experience. But the fruits of such an effort can be tremendous. The website would be more neatly organized, which would automatically make it easier to browse. This would automatically draw more traffic than a disorganized and cluttered one. So in the process of creating an accessible site for the disabled, you make your site more usable, which can thereby improve employee productivity or even increase business.

There are ample success stories to prove that this actually works. A leading bank in the US for instance, made its banking website more accessible much before the others. So while other banks considered it a waste of time, lots of people with physical disabilities became customers of this bank and started using its site for online banking. Looking at this trend, the other banks had no choice but to follow suit, but they had lost the first mover advantage by then.

There's a similar success story of an online store that made its site more accessible. Shopping in a grocery store can be quite a challenging task for anybody with physical disabilities. For them, placing an online order to a grocery store would be much more convenient. So the online store in question made its site more accessible. This resulted in an increase in traffic, and interestingly, a majority of them were normal people without any disabilities. They just found the site more usable.

Besides websites, lots of other things can be made more accessible as well. It just depends upon your imagination. A bank could make its ATMs more accessible, by putting text to speech or fingerprint scanners in them. A cellphone manufacturer could make cellphones with larger font displays and voice based operation, and much more. By doing this, companies can help themselves as well as the society.