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Equalweb adapts websites to make them more accessible to people with disabilities
September 2, 2020
About 45 million people have some limitation on internet access —and the problem is not in the lack of broadband. They are people with some disability, especially visual or auditory, who need some help to surf the internet. But although Brazilian legislation requires websites to be inclusive, 99% of sites in Brazil have some barrier that makes navigation difficult, according to a study by the Web for All movement.
About 45 million people have some limitation on internet access —and the problem is not in the lack of broadband. They are people with some disability, especially visual or auditory, who need some help to surf the internet. But although Brazilian legislation requires websites to be inclusive, 99% of sites in Brazil have some barrier that makes navigation difficult, according to a study by the Web for All movement.
—Society is undergoing a digital transformation in this pandemic, but an important portion of society cannot be left out," says Andrea Schwarz, CEO of iigual, a traditional inclusion and diversity consultancy for the labor market, and which is bringing to Brazil the technology of Equalweb, an Israeli startup of accessibility solution for websites. In the U.S., a country of the lawsuit industry, sites with accessibility limitations are in the crosshairs of individuals or civil rights associations.. Last year, singer Beyonce was sued by a visually impaired woman for violating U.S. accessibility legislation because the Beyonce.com website had no tools for people with acute vision loss. The number of such lawsuits increased by 12% last year.
Equalweb is a cloud-based technology that works in an automated manner without interfering with the structure of the site. Features allow you to adapt the site to different types of disability and include font size, voice command, text reader, image description and color customization. Equalweb was founded six years ago and was recently selected by Microsoft in Israel for an artificial intelligence startup acceleration program for good. The technology is present on 10,000 websites in 35 languages. In Brazil, the first clients include Unisuam College. And Andrea is in advanced negotiations with a big bank.
Closed captions for videos and audio content enable people with hearing impairments to understand the content. EqualWeb has become the first web accessibility vendor to provide a video and audio closed captions option for people with disabilities as part of its automatic services.
The unique benefit of the function is that it’s entirely automatic. Moreover, as the website owner, you can modify the automatic generic text if you find a mismatch between the video and the text (the AI may miss a few words here and there), using the Captions Editor in your dashboard.
The closed captions function includes a simple on-and-off activation button, a rating vote for feedback purposes, a new transcription window over the video or audio element, and a captions download option. The captions’ font conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 standards for easily accessible fonts.
An accessible design for a website means that the website is designed and developed in a way that makes it usable and understandable for people with disabilities. This includes people with visual, auditory, physical, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.
In the web accessibility field we hear a lot about assistive technology. But people without disabilities will be mostly ignorant about what assistive technology actually is, as well as what constitutes assistive technology. So let us break down for you the meaning of assistive technology, how important it is, and what your role, as the providers of goods and services to individuals with impairments, is for compatibility with assistive technologies.
