Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Every 3rd Thursday of May has been recognized as global accessibility awareness day (GAAD). Today (17/5/2018) marks the 7th ietration of the event.

This time around I was fortunate to represent my organization (Cinqueon)at the event in my institute commemorating the event, to learn more about it.

I will list down the major takeaways from the event and the small bit which me and my team at Cinqueon have done in this regard.

The first thing to keep in mind is that we need to think of accessibility at the start, from version 0.1 rather than version 13, which would involve a lot of rewrite, the team from olacabs shared a similar practical experience.

Ideally the focus towards usability and accessibility should start during the course of our Computer Science education. A broad based awareness of disabilities is the only way people can be truly sensitized towards this issue.

Fact of the matter is that around 15% of population is disabled according to WHO, which means you as software designers and developers would be losing out on a huge section of the population. Just in India this number would be more than 100 million, to give you a perspective of the scale that is involved.

Moreover, Right of Persons with Disability Act, 2016 mandates for equitable access in every aspect of society for disabled people, even in software products and services. This would be enforced by June 2019, which is just a year away! Not a lot of time for total code refactoring if you ask me.

In all honesty starting product development before thinking about accessibility is like sharpening a knife which has no handle. We at Cinqueon, had conceptualized of an alternate User Experience long before we even actually started up.

We build enterprise business applications, on top of our Industry 4.0 solutions Platform. Even though we work with business apps, we have given a lot of heed to our design aspects. Powered by proprietary engine CinqAI, we have a voice user interface (VUI )and Text Input Interface, where you can essentially talk to your enterprise apps, which can be accessed from your mobile devices or even smart assistants like Google Home and Amazon Alexa.

If you want to learn more about accessibility w3c web accessibility initiative is a great place to start. (Actually you should not call yourself a web dev if you haven’t heard of them!).

Do reach out to me if you want to know more about what we do!

About Us

We are an Industry 4.0 solutions platform company leveraging the power of IoT for enterprises looking to quickly and cost effectively experiment, view and realise the business benefits of the IoT and AI revolution.

Check us out at www.cinqueon.com.

Reach to us at info@cinqueon.com