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IT for disabled
Anil Chopra
Saturday, March 01, 2008
I 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.
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| Anil Chopra, Editor |
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.
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