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

As 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

To 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.

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Posted by: Marc Hardwick at 17:54

Tags: innovation   accessibility  

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