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Tuesday 06 August 2024

Accessibility - yesterday’s assistive tech is today’s emerging trend

TCSAs an analyst working within our TechSectorViews, I spend a lot of my time looking at the market impact of a broad range of emerging technologies – from automation to data, analytics and AI, to cyber, right through to customer and employee experience. Whilst we write about and reference accessibility within UKHotViews (see here and read back) posts we do not treat it as a separate discipline, and have not to date looked at its market impact or potential. Indeed, for my sins, I have always considered accessibility tech to be a noble, yet niche component of the wider SITS market driven in part by CSR or regulatory requirements. However, I am always very open to having my knowledge updated and views challenged, and recent conversations with IT Services giant TCS were around how research and innovation within accessibility tech were underpinning solution development, and adoption, within the wider SITS market, and indeed were creating new much broader market opportunities.

TCS Accessibility Research

Dr JadhevTo learn more, I spent some time recently with Dr Charudatta Jadhav (pictured), TCS’s head of Accessibility Research when he was over in the UK visiting the firm’s Bishopsgate HQ. Dr Jadhav has a long and distinguished career in accessibility research and leads TCS’s innovation and strategy work in this area. In recent years, he has witnessed accessibility tech increasingly move beyond its original focus towards building solutions that offer a much better experience across the board, as accessibility increasingly breaks down barriers for all types of users.

Dr Jadhav himself has been on a remarkable journey that started with his sudden loss of sight when he was just 13, onto a career that has encompassed banking and software development, before becoming the head of the Accessibility Research at TCS, not to mention a passion for competition chess.

Dr Jadhav started our conversation by outlining the evolution of accessibility research that was initially adopted as a component of firms’ corporate social responsibility, before being driven by legal compliance requirements, yet now is increasingly seen as a business and commercial opportunity serving a much broader market.

TCS's current approach to accessibility is their concept “Inclusive Thinking”. This approach fundamentally is about designing for limitations rather than specific disabilities, which then yields innovations that can benefit both people with disabilities and other users across a wide range of situations. Specific examples of technology innovation emanating from their research include:

  • Access Infinity - a platform that makes educational content accessible in various formats, including real-time newspaper access for visually impaired users.
  • Maths decoder – which converts mathematical expressions into verbal descriptions.
  • Smart glass - which uses AI and multimodal interactions (gestures, voice etc.) to assist visually impaired students. The device can recognise people, read handwritten or printed text, translate to different languages, identify currency, detect objects, and control home devices. It is also equipped with a smart voice assistant.
  • Indoor navigation system – that provides accurate guidance without sensors enabling the visually impaired to navigate indoor environments via precise directions.
  • Sign language interpreter - converts between sign language, text, and audio bridging the gap between people with hearing impairment and other individuals.

A market with enormous potential

PurpleDuring the conversation, it became very clear the size and scale of the potential of the UK accessibility market, and what remains a significant untapped market. Research on the Purple Pound (The Purple Pound refers to the collective spending power of disabled consumers. The term is a way to highlight the economic influence of this demographic) by charity Purple (see here) show the scale of the opportunity in the UK, where 22% or 1 in 5 UK consumers have disabilities, with 73% of potential disabled customers experiencing barriers on more than a quarter of the websites they visit. The charity estimates that there are more than 14m disabled people in the UK who have a combined spending power of £274bn and are “fiercely loyal to disabled friendly organisations”.

However, TCS firmly believes the real potential of accessibility sits beyond disability. The firm’s philosophy of “designing for limitation” should help grow the business potential further. For example, disability tends to increase with age as life expectancy increases with advanced medical care. So, if one designs for limitations then older demographics will be able to benefit from accessible designs. As per united nations population projections, the worldwide share of people aged sixty-five almost doubled – increasing from 5.5% to 10.3% between 1974 and 2024. Between 2024 and 2074, this number should double again adding significantly to the market potential for accessibility. Designing for limitations also caters for “multimodal interactions” with systems and that offers another potential market with Gen Z. Gen Z typically expects multiple modalities (gesture, voice, typing etc) and consume content in different ways to previous generations.

TCS also explores several innovative areas, and where Dr. Jadhav believes accessibility’s greatest potential may well lie, citing the examples of ‘technologies’ including eye tracking, audiobooks, ramps, brain machine interface, and gesture related tech, that have all already gone beyond an accessibility remit. The mantra is that accessibility leads to inclusion, and inclusion leads to innovation, and that yesterday’s assistive technologies are today’s emerging trends.

Key to delivering on this vision is both collaboration and on the need for changing perceptions. Here TCS partners with various organisations, including universities, NGOs, and standards bodies, to advance accessibility research and implementation. On perception Jadhav concluded by emphasising the need to change societal mindsets around accessibility, seeing it as an opportunity for innovation and improved user experience for all, rather than just a compliance issue. He believes that financial services may likely take the lead in implementing these innovations commercially.

Key takeaways

My time with TCS and especially with Dr Jadhav was well spent, an impressive individual, leading on some remarkable innovation that is helping shift accessibility tech beyond just serving disabilities. In particular, the logic of designing for limitations is extremely compelling given the potential market size. TMV’s research theme for this year is all about enabling acceleration, and where accessibility tech has a key role to play in driving solution innovation in a range of areas that may have seen adoption delayed if not prioritised within this remit. Often consumers do not know what they want or indeed need until they witness an innovation first hand and the benefits accrued. As such, designing for accessibility and overcoming specific barriers or limitations is putting technology out there that can then be trialled and ultimately adopted in a wider, mass market context. Given the value that is being extracted from accessibility tech already to date, I fully expect the worlds of accessibility and mainstream solutions development to merge in the medium term.

Posted by Marc Hardwick at '16:40' - Tagged: innovation   charity   accessibility  

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