Web Accessibility Startup Evinced Releases Results Of Recent Industry-Wide Accessibility Study

Forbes Leadership Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Web Accessibility Startup Evinced Releases Results Of Recent Industry-Wide Accessibility Study Steven Aquino Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Steven covers accessibility and assistive technology. Following May 24, 2023, 06:21pm EDT | Press play to listen to this article! Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Evinced conducted a survey that examined accessibility’s place in the tech industry.

Google Images Palo Alto-based web accessibility startup Evinced , whose CEO Navin Thadani has been interviewed several times for this column, recently released results of a survey looking at accessibility in the tech industry. According to Evinced, the methodology by which the survey was conducted was via a partnership with market research firm InnovateMR . The survey queried 250 directors (or higher-level roles) at Fortune 2000 companies via computer-assisted telephonic interviews.

The project began on April 17 and concluded on May 11 of this year. The survey includes data from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Amongst the survey’s biggest takeaways, Evinced found accessibility is important to Fortune 2000 companies “even if they don’t have a formal accessibility department.

” Of the people who work on accessibility in these organizations, 76% of people (80% of CEOs) said they consider doing work on accessibility” somewhat or very important. ” Furthermore, current efforts in this space require a good deal of help from outsourced vendors. To wit, 98% of companies use third-party tools while 86% use contractors for tasks like audits, scanning, remediation, and more.

Other notable findings include the common practice of integrating accessibility into automated functional testing. Despite this, however, program managers and engineers aren’t “very satisfied” with the work’s current pace, saying companies’ efforts are only moderately successful. In a brief interview with me, Thadani explained the motivation behind doing the survey was simply to get accessibility “solved on the web and mobile.

” He added everyone in the industry has a responsibility to take accessibility seriously, as it’s this seriousness that’s truly going to affect positive changes in the long-term. Evinced was particularly keen to gauge how accessibility is viewed at companies of larger sizes, given they naturally have considerably more resources than smaller companies to devote towards this work. “It would have been easy us for us to assume that all companies this size are deeply committed to accessibility because our customers fit that description,” Thadani said.

“We would say these results show us just what accessibility leaders our customers really are. ” MORE FOR YOU North Face, Target Latest Focus Of LGBTQ Culture Wars: Here Are All The Others Today’s ‘Quordle’ Answers And Clues For Wednesday, May 24 Spring 2023 Layoff Tracker Meta First Citizens Bank Axe Hundreds Of Jobs At a macro level, Thadani told me the survey is self-serving to him and his team insofar as the results have helped them glean insight into problem areas where Evinced may be positioned to help. As ever with accessibility and disability representation writ large societally, the work is evergreen.

It sounds trite, but there truly is more work to be done. “We would say, from these results, that there is a fair distance left to go [in] making leaders understand that accessibility is about more—much more—than, say, color contrast and alt-text for images,” Thadani said of the insights from the survey. “It’s a tough job that needs to be done.

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