For original article, click here.
Bay Area-based web accessibility startup Evinced is one of a few recurring characters to appear in this column. They last surfaced back in January, when chief executive officer Navin Thadani spoke with me about his company’s growth, the importance of accessibility awareness, and more. The company makes software, such as checkers, that helps web developers make their sites accessible to disabled people.
To commemorate Global Accessibility Awareness Day this year, Evinced is releasing the results of findings of a study done on the world’s top 30 public websites. The companies were ranked based on market capitalization, with a combined market cap of $1.7 trillion. Evinced scanned each website to determine how accessible they are; of them, Microsoft’s was the only one not used as Evinced says it was unavailable.
It turns out, Evinced reported most are doing well accessibility-wise. Amongst the standout insights gleaned from the study, Evinced found 64 critical issues on Meta’s site, with the top 10 components explaining 94% of the problems. Likewise, Exxon Mobil’s site had 171 critical issues with the top 10 components explaining 100% of the problems.
“Evinced’s customers are large, progressive organizations who are really committed to digital accessibility. Working with these customers, it’s always been our experience that a relatively small number of coding practices—called ‘components’—have an outsized relationship to the accessibility problems that a website runs into,” Thadani told me this week in an exclusive new interview over email. “So we had a hunch going into the analysis that it might be true for other companies, but we didn’t have the data to show it, at least for this entire set of companies. Fortunately, it’s straightforward to generate the data with our tools.”
Evinced rates the severity of sites’ accessibility issues to identify what Thadani called “functional blockers”—elements on a page that are bound to wreak havoc with assistive tech like screen readers. On a large site containing hundreds of pages, it’s easily possible to encounter thousands of accessibility problems. Part and parcel of Evinced’s mission to make the web a more accessible place is the realization that many people simply don’t understand what it means to be accessible. As such, it’s necessary to build tools to guide less-savvy developers towards the promised land. What Evinced does for the web, large companies like Apple have created similar tools like the Accessibility Inspector for its platforms’ development environment, Xcode. The goal is to help third-party developers ensure their apps are accessible as they can be. “[Knowing] exactly where to look [to make things accessible], and what levers to pull, is the first step in changing a development organization into an accessible development organization,” Thadani said.
Fortunately, Thadani and team see the results as reason for optimism; as mentioned before, most sites are doing well on the accessibility front. The big picture idea is the data shows that accessibility is making steady progress in its push into the mainstream consciousness. As has been said numerous times in the disparate-yet-connected stories that fill this space, the technological needs of the disability community are garnering ever-increasing attention by not only tech companies, but any company who has a digital presence. Who doesn’t have a presence on the internet nowadays? It is table stakes to do the right thing so literally everyone has full access to the web, on mobile, etc. Disability is diversity, after all.
“As companies get better at developing their web and mobile projects in an accessible way, usage will increase from the users who are currently running into roadblocks,” Thadani said. “Additionally, the response we see from our tools making accessible development so much easier suggests that it’s only a matter of time before every committed enterprise approaches development this way.”
He continued: “[We] really feel that the only way digital accessibility moves forward is if compliance teams and development teams build a new working relationship based on shared tools, goals, and approaches. That might sound really abstract, but what it means is that the individual developer gets the tools to make sure code is already accessible even before it moves into later stages of the pipeline. We totally see that happening now, at least with our customers, but the day every company does that will be a day we can all be proud and happy about.”
