One of the current trends out there is digital transformation and if we want to implement it correctly we need to make it accessible to more people, otherwise we didn’t actually do it.
Digital transformation is the process of adoption and implementation of digital technology by an organization in order to create new or modify existing products, services and operations.
What is digital transformation, from Wikipedia (opens in new window).
The goal for its implementation is to increase value through innovation, invention, customer experience or efficiency.
Let’s take a simple example of converting an old bank to a modern, digital bank. It will not help us a lot if we just take the paper forms and convert them to online forms. At least that is not the main goal of digital transformation. It will for sure make our bank a bit more accessible, provided we make the forms accessible. With making our bank digital and accessible at the same time, we can increase our customer base. But we need to think beyond the forms and webpages to be really accessible.
As I mentioned in my Online business and accessibility best practices post we need to digitalize more than just our core business. We need to take care about pre-sales, marketing, customer self care, on-boarding and even off-boarding. And when we are doing that we need to take care accessibility is a part of it from the start. If we push efforts to make our services and products accessible from the start we will often just deliver inaccessibility. And with that make a giant “accessibility debt”.
Before we go with digital transformation we need to plan accordingly. I am certain that experienced architects nowadays have best practices in their processes of planning. All from security, cloud services, scalability, external plug an play services and so on is making transformation way easier than it was a decade ago. But we can still see that accessibility is left out. It’s left out from planning, it’s left out from project management, it’s left out from designing, it’s left out from development and it’s left out from testing.
So it’s not strange that often our digital transformation forgets about accessibility and deliver inaccessible products and services. I wonder how Web Accessibility Directive, European Accessibility Act and other accessibility legislation around the world (opens in new window) fall out of planning and implementation even now. I blame it on lack of awareness and partially also because accessibility is not taught in schools, nor it is a part of curricula of professions that are responsible for digital transformation.
So please, spread the word – we need accessibility to be an integrated part of digital transformation or else we potentially discriminate up to a quarter of people!
