Why should every IT employee should know about disability and inclusion in the design?

Suppose your father had an eye injury or cataract surgery. He may be unable to use mobile and its application properly due to a temporary vision disability. Being tech-savvy, you will immediately enable the dark mode, screen reading and speech commands on the mobile.

Now, pause and think if all applications have accessibility features like a regional language app that can help your father and many others. 

As software engineers, we have the power and means to make applications accessible and usable for everyone. People should have an in-depth understanding of disabilities to truly develop accessible software.

Why is accessible software crucial for career growth in 2023?

 Disabilities in people may be visible (physical/ hearing/ visual), non-visible (intellectual/ functional), permanent or situational.  The WHO has identified over 1 billion disabled people, 20% of whom live with great functional difficulties in their day-to-day lives.  

Developing inclusive software and applications is the need of the hour to widen the scope of a project and cater to a broader audience. Deeper understanding on unconscious bias, design-thinking and inclusive conversations is crucial for employees. 

Publicis Sapient organized an accessibility hackathon internally to generate awareness and invite innovative solutions. You can check Publicis Sapient reviews or LinkedIn posts to know more about the event.

 How to address accessibility challenges:

• Visible disabilities: By integrating screen readers, using speech commands in Windows 10 and speech recognition in applications.

• Non-visible disabilities: Inclusive Artificial Intelligence (IAI) coding is the path to aid unbiased data intelligence. As more data is collected from people with intellectual disabilities, AI can articulate customer needs better. As intellectual disabilities are often masked, developing training model on large data set is the optimal solution.

• Below picture shows the difference between inclusive and exclusive AI:  
  
  
  

An analogy for non-visible disability

I was browsing through different automatic gear car models for my father when I came across Tata Altroz and Maruti Ignis. Although both the models have an automatic variant, Altroz has only automatic-gear functionality thus a slower learning curve. Ignis has automatic + manual mode, which was confusing for my father. My father is not disabled, but he is a senior citizen and we take extra security measures for him.

 Continue reading Publicis Sapient reviews to keep abreast with the latest trends and organizational information.