Make space for all: Digital accessibility benefits everyone

To deliver on these three areas, a digital accessibility program has to be crafted with care and executed with precision.

Principles of accessible design are well understood in physical architecture (a staircase excludes wheelchairs; a ramp doesn’t) and industrial design (if you’re among the 90% of humans who are right-handed, you’ve probably never noticed how many inherently right-handed items you touch in a day—removing “handedness” from things like scissors helps lefties and hinders no one).

In the digital space, there are many adaptive and assistive technologies in use, some of them with frankly amazing abilities—but very often the solutions are partial, or don’t interface well with each other. And unless you depend on them, you probably don’t think about them much.

We need to take that ambidextrous scissors concept and apply it to things like websites, portals, shopping carts, business software—and yes, social media and entertainment (looking at you, Wordle!) Because genuine accessibility helps everyone by removing barriers to receiving and delivering information, products, or services.

Adding accessibility features as appendages to core functionality can enable more access for more people. But over time, incremental widget add-ons lead to complicated learning curves and increased complexity—the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do. Which is why organizations need to tackle digital accessibility with a comprehensive, platform-first approach.

Your platform needs to deliver without presenting obstacles to people using Braille keypads or screen readers, eye tracking technology, voice-to-text, and sign language.

This is especially true in the workplace, where you need seamless interactivity between people who use assistive features and those who don’t. Imagine working from home through the pandemic if you required closed-captioning and Zoom didn’t have that functionality!

People who live with disabilities, in a world that often doesn’t accommodate their constraints very gracefully, face social barriers in addition to physical ones. The workarounds they devise to navigate that world on their own terms are both instructive and awe-inspiring.

Organizations need feedback from people with disabilities to understand what’s working and what’s not. Better yet, they need to hire people with disabilities across the board. They should be embedded in our design teams, our customer success teams, our marketing teams, our QA teams, our developer teams—only then can we be truly inclusive of the accessible point of view.

Something else to consider: Just as organizations include unconscious bias training when they onboard new employees, the same can be done with accessibility awareness.

ServiceNow is on track to bake accessibility into all onboarding training. Depending on the discipline of each new hire—design, QA, development, marketing, program management—we’ll provide deeper levels of training to ensure they have the knowledge and tools to keep digital accessibility at the forefront of their job.

Moving into the maturation phase of our accessibility journey means embedding accessibility into the entire software development lifecycle.

It means close monitoring of what’s working and what needs improvement. It means putting people into positions where their insights can be acted upon. And it means documentation and training, until it becomes second nature for accessibility features to be a given in everything we make.

Working in the accessibility space has made me better at what I do. I see that happening with all of my team members when they start to look at our software with the eyes of someone navigating the world without the use of their hands, their voices, their eyesight.

It would be “enough” if digital accessibility features “only” benefited people with disabilities—it truly would. But the beautiful thing is, it inherently goes far beyond that. There is immense transformative potential in bringing digital accessibility to the core of your enterprise. For everyone.

This post originally appeared on Forbes BrandVoice.