Reflecting on GAAD

[Music] [Applause] you know, as we are here at another global accessibility awareness day, as you think back on the last year in accessibility, um are there any victories or losses, steps forward or backward, things that that kind of resonate with you that happened over the last year? um awareness around accessibility has has certainly reached uh in many cases a a much more mainstream place. Um the action around accessibility is now the question. And so we looked at the top 50 apps across iOS and Android and five different industries um kind of diverse industries to try to understand what is the current state of accessibility when it comes to native mobile apps. And what we found was um uh disappointing but not surprising. Um, you asked about steps forward, steps back. And what we found in looking at 200 different user journeys across these 50 50 apps is that almost three out of four of those user journeys delivered a poor or failing user experience for users of assist of technology in at least one step of the user journey, which can can result in drop off and and attrition and failure to convert and all the things that businesses care about. Um, and so kind of coming back to the question of do we have we made progress? I would say the awareness has definitely made progress. It's part of the conversation now in ways that it didn't used to be, but the execution is still where lots of teams struggle. Yeah. You know, I I couldn't agree with you more. Right. If I if everything is accessible inside of your app, but then you get to one area that is not, that could be a a deal breaker, right? If if I can make my way to your product and add it to the cart, but the actual cart itself is not accessible, then what good is it, right? So having any breakdown in that user journey, to your point, could could cause folks to go away, right? I would if I couldn't use the cart on an e-commerce site or app. Yeah. and and that was one of the things that we looked at in the report. Um in addition to kind of our internal testing uh with our team of u accessibility experts um we have a team that has been doing accessibility in mobile apps for you know a number of years now but we don't have a large team of users with disabilities. So we actually partnered with um uh usability testing uh uh company Fable to bring users with disabilities into the the assessment and analysis and kind of provide not just validation of what we found in our internal testing but giving that additional color and clarity and and awareness around the actual impact the real user impact of those findings. And that's what we found is that, you know, when you hit an app is really only as good as its point of highest frustration. Yep. And so, you know, we found that even one step in that core user journey uh in in those apps could be the difference between a sale or a conversion or retaining a user or not. Um, can you tell us what the GAD Foundation is, what they do, and kind of what what your role with them is like? Yeah, so I am on the board of directors uh of the Gad Foundation. Um the the board um has uh members like me who come from different organizations and uh we serve a three-year term um on the board and we try to bring the message of GAD and the uh kind of amplification of accessibility outside of just the accessibility community. lots of incredibly skilled, talented, passionate professionals all working on accessibility. But we find that the most important thing is that um we can't just be preaching to the choir of people who already recognize the value of accessibility. We've got to be talking to the business leaders. We've got to be talking to the founders and and um engineers and designers who haven't heard about it yet and don't know what it's for. and maybe or or maybe if they have heard about accessibility see it as something that slows them down in in their creative or development process. The the other thing that that the Gad Foundation does is help amplify those events that are being held around the world uh within organizations either publicly or privately to uh to recognize and raise that that awareness uh of accessibility within those organizations. And then the last one is uh the GAD pledge which every year GAD foundation works with one organization that takes uh a pledge to make and it's typically something like um uh a foundational uh framework or uh platform that many developers use across products and across companies. Gad Foundation will work with that uh framework to make that foundational platform more accessible so that that's kind of a key leverage point in the building of accessible products is that the the building blocks become more accessible and therefore teams that may not even know um as much about how to build accessibly get the benefit of those building blocks being more accessible themselves. That's fantastic. I I couldn't agree with you more. Right. If you can work with with the platform developers and vendors to ensure that the platforms themselves are accessible and promote developing accessible content, uh it makes all the difference, right? We we at Alliant work quite closely with Shopify on the accessibility of their platform and you know if you are creating a website kind of out of the box, it it has a lot of those accessibility enhancements baked right in and it's it's a great way to get accessibility at scale. [Music] I don't know.