Today’s business leaders have a new area of priority: environmental, social, and governance (ESG), which is a hot topic from boardroom to blog page. In the recent IDC Worldwide CEO Survey conducted in February 2024, 42% of European CEOs stated that meeting ESG goals is among their top 3 business priorities and requirements, with social sustainability representing a pivotal point.
Moreover, CEOs think that the changing ESG targets and regulations are among the top three external factors impacting organizations over the next 12 months.
However, we haave noted a sharper focus on the environmental and governance aspects than on the social side. Even when the social side is the subject of focus, the initiatives considered most often typically relate to gender diversity, belief respect, cultural integration, and similar areas.
One important aspect that has been and is still too often neglected is the accessibility of organizations’ digital workspaces and workplaces.
Addressing the vast aspect of digital accessibility is complex.
The Future of Work Must Be All-Inclusive
We define digital accessibility as digital technologies and services being accessible to everyone, including people with physical impairments, regardless of whether they are related to motor function, vision, hearing, speech or neurodivergence.
Until now, the breadth and complexity of digital accessibility has slowed down development in areas such as regulation, as well as an understanding of how to include in the workplace people with disabilities. Today there is a sharper focus on levelling the ground in the job market, vendors are specializing in transformation, certification, and training or taking the first steps in implementing them in their products. Some were even created with this purpose in mind — i.e., funded to assist with digital accessibility mandates and requirements.
Digital accessibility evaluates the accessibility of technologies, but technologies are also the key solution for organizations to address their digital accessibility implementation gaps. Advances in technologies, especially in generative AI, will be beneficial in further integrating digital accessibility into internal and external process, products, and services, supporting mandates on digital accessibility for consumers and the workforce – as the workforce is the organization’s internal technology “consumer”.
A plethora of hardware and software has been delivered to assist organizations in closing the digital accessibility gap, but there are even more technologies that have not been designed for this purpose, but which in everyday use will contribute to closing the digital accessibility gap. The latter includes AI and generative AI, which were designed as general-purpose technologies, but which can support closing the dig accessibility gap across numerous use cases.
The figure below showcases technologies and initiatives that could be implemented for digital accessibility across IDC’s three main Future of Work pillars.
Within the augmentation pillar, technologies support people with different disabilities, with the clear objective of augmenting them. Gesture-to-voice solutions help people with phonological difficulties to integrate in the workplace and workspace, as the technology facilitates communication with people not versed in sign language.
Technologies in the space pillar have the objective of supporting people with impairments in accessing the organization’s resources and other daily activities and tasks. eSignature, for example, helps people with impaired physical dexterity or loss of touch (hypoesthesia) to sign documents digitally, removing the need for pens or physical documents.
Within the culture pillar, technology plays a side role, but numerous initiatives must be implemented by organizations to create a more digitally inclusive environment. For example, with trainings and firsthand experiences or community recruitment for testing and allies.
5 Recommendations to Improve Digital Accessibility
Guidance in this area is clearly needed, especially as the European Accessibility Act will be enforced across the entire European Union in 2025. Here is our short to-do list for initiating or improving your organization’s approach to digital accessibility:
- Assess and audit internal and external products, tools, and services for accessibility and remediate to ensure everyone is onboard and no one is left behind.
- Create a solid community to help the organization meet accessibility requirements through firsthand experience.
- Educate your internal and external communities on accessibility and DEI with general mandatory training for the entire workforce and tailored learning paths that are function- or role-specific.
- Keep up with changing technologies and regulatory requirements, ensuring full local and international compliance, and make certain that worker and customer experience meet generally accepted standards.
- Shift to an accessible-by-design mindset, ensuring that apps, platforms, and software developed for internal use — as well as products, services, customer experience — are accessible-by-design.
Digital accessibility is a goal we are approaching incrementally, but if you are interested and want more information, you can check out our report “Digital Accessibility in Europe in a Nutshell” or reach out to the IDC Future of Work team and stay tuned for future details.