6 The Role of Technical Standards in Improving Digital Accessibility in Under-Resourced Regions and Communities

An estimated 4.4 billion people out of the world’s estimated population of 7.7 billion are online, according to March 2019 data (Miniwatts Marketing Group, 2020). While the average worldwide online presence is 56.8%, regional differences in online access are striking. In Europe and North America, nearly 90% of the population is online. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Oceania, and Australia, internet access averages in the high 60 percents. Across Asia, internet access is in the low 50 percents, and in Africa it is only in the high 30 percents.

In 2011, the World Report on Disability estimated that one billion people in the world have significant disabilities (World Health Organization & World Bank, 2011). Accessibility barriers still pervade every country, though to varying degrees, due to progress in disability rights in some countries in recent decades. In low-income countries and lower middle-income countries (World Bank Group, n.d.), people with disabilities sometimes face additional economic, physical, and communication barriers in comparison to their peers in other regions.

The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (2006a) defines a broad set of rights that address barriers throughout many aspects of society, including barriers in digital technologies. Particularly important in the context of digital accessibility are Articles 9 and 21 of the CRPD (see Chapter 1: Development for All for additional detail), which continue to be essential and impactful concepts.

Article 9 (CRPD, 2006b) directs States Parties “to promote access for PWDs to new information and communications technologies (ICT) and systems, including the internet, and to promote the design, development, production and distribution of accessible information and communications technologies ICT and systems at an early stage, so that these technologies and systems become accessible at minimum cost.” Article 21 (CRPD, 2006c) directs States Parties to ensure that PWDs can “exercise the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas on an equal basis with others and through all forms of communication of their choice” and outlines essential steps to achieving this, urging provision of information “in accessible formats and technologies appropriate to different kinds of disabilities in a timely manner and without additional cost.”

As new technologies emerge, will they be “born accessible” in order to meet human rights needs for the millions of people around the world with disabilities? Or, will the multi-year lags in digital accessibility that people with disabilities have experienced over the years continue in even worse forms, as these technologies become more prevalent in low-income and lower middle-income countries?

Many types of disabilities can be impacted by the presence or absence of accessible technologies. These disabilities include blindness and low vision, deafness and hardness of hearing, mobility and dexterity limitations, speech disabilities, and cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities. Given the expanding scope of digital technologies—not only on personal computers and mobile but also within the web of things, digital publishing, telemedicine, autonomous vehicles, and more—timely development of digital accessibility is essential.

In some under-resourced regions, very few people have access to digital technology, though this can change rapidly, as in rural Kenya and other rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, and likewise in Papua New Guinea, where off-grid solar installations now generally come with mobile phone chargers (Ellsmoor, 2019).

In other regions, access to digital technologies may be inconsistent and unreliable. In these regions it may be tempting to think that planning ahead for digital accessibility should wait, given that people with disabilities are necessarily dealing with myriad survival needs. Given that retrofitting for accessibility is one of the least efficient approaches to making technology accessible, where possible it is valuable to anticipate and plan for future needs for digital accessibility. However, it is not always possible, and sometimes digital accessibility must wait until survival needs are met.

Colleagues in Venezuela emphasized this in recent years, noting that in the absence of functioning systems for education, healthcare, and food distribution and a general economy, there was no ability to promote awareness of applicable accessibility policies, let alone the means to monitor or enforce them. There was not a stable enough economy to develop accessibility specialties in web and mobile design and development businesses, despite the existence of free international resources providing accessibility guidance. Students with disabilities were cut off from schooling opportunities that supported their accessibility needs, and even from basic healthcare that would help them stay healthy enough to attend school, especially in rural areas of the country.

These circumstances highlighted the relevance of all the other basic human needs and civil rights in the CRPD as critical precursors for engaging meaningfully in advocating for digital accessibility.

The ability to access online information and engage with others online can be radically transformative. But for people with disabilities in under-resourced regions and communities, age-old barriers in community infrastructure—as simple and pervasive as stairs at the entrances to computer training centers or a lack of interpreters for deaf students—can make it harder to even get in the door to learn these new technologies. These are barriers that we hear about from around the world, including from under-resourced communities within high-income countries.

Digital accessibility, or the lack thereof, can impact opportunities for people with disabilities across all aspects of life. It can facilitate or block opportunities to learn, to work, to engage in commerce, to participate in civic society, to obtain healthcare, to entertain and be entertained, to contribute to the community, to be informed about the world, and to inform the world about one’s own experiences and perspectives.

When chalk and blackboard-based education suddenly leaps into the digital age, it can set people with disabilities further behind their peers. Internationally available “massive open online courses,” if inaccessible, cannot be fixed at a local level. When new online banking options are inaccessible, entrepreneurs with disabilities can be shut out of local economies until accessibility barriers are resolved. When telemedicine is the only access to medical care, especially specialized providers needed for treatment of disabling conditions, if a telemedicine platform is not accessible, that can mean no access to medical care for patients who need to stay healthy enough to self-advocate.

But with advanced planning to ensure that new technologies are designed for inclusion, these sudden leaps into the digital future can be an equalizer rather than a new mechanism of exclusion.

Every emerging technology brings the risk of new barriers for people with disabilities, just as in the physical world. Barriers may be introduced because of lack of awareness and training on the need for accessibility, or may stem from a lack of testing during design and development.

On websites, examples of barriers include images and videos without descriptions; text that does not reflow smoothly when enlarged; audio without captions, interactive web content lacking interoperability with assistive technologies; websites with inconsistent navigation menus and options; or blinking and flashing content that can cause distraction or seizures. Other barriers include e-books without chapter-by-chapter navigation, which is critical for people with print disabilities; and inaccessible interfaces to devices and sensors to control home or work environments.

For people in low-income and lower middle-income countries or in marginalized Indigenous communities, lower regional levels of online access often combine with other factors to exacerbate inaccessibility. A lack of training resources for users, designers, or developers can combine with inadequate local telecommunication infrastructures and an unreliable local power grid. Resources to evaluate and monitor accessibility, and to remediate inaccessibility, may be non-existent. There may be no policies that require accessibility for local government, businesses, or other organizations.

In Argentina, despite its upper middle-income economy and the presence of relevant policies, there is no ecosystem of awareness, including knowledgeable developers, skilled evaluation resources, and more, to drive web accessibility progress at the local or national levels.

People with disabilities often have less access to education, which includes the foreign language instruction needed to take advantage of international accessibility advocacy resources. This is the case in countries such as China and Mongolia, even though knowledge of English may be relatively high among the non-disabled population. Therefore, availability of technical and educational resources in local languages becomes especially important. Lags in localization of assistive technologies such as screen readers particularly impact language communities with small populations. For instance, although Slovenia is an upper middle-income country, local accessibility advocates note that the small population (2 million) sometimes means delays in updated translations of NVDA, a popular, free, volunteer-translated screen reader. This can interrupt the ability of individuals to use key software, websites, and browsers or authoring tools. Of the 60 languages where NVDA localizations are supported (GitHub, 2020), only 34 of those have up-to-date translations at the time of writing.

Even in the highest-income countries, under-resourcing of some communities can have significant impact on the technology needs of people with disabilities. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the United States, it particularly devastated low-income communities. At that time, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management System only supported one type of browser for emergency assistance applications, creating interoperability barriers for people who had lost access to their assistive technology when their neighborhoods were submerged by floods. Similarly, people with disabilities in many Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States must deal with little to no internet connectivity compared to other regions of these countries.

A combination of multiple barriers across infrastructure and social sectors can be insurmountable. To ensure that the benefits of digital accessibility are available to people with disabilities in under-resourced regions, it is important to ensure comprehensive barrier reduction throughout all aspects of the CRPD.

Web and mobile accessibility can be keystone technologies for driving cross-sector accessibility progress and facilitating disability inclusion, which drives more progress. They can provide a platform over which people with disabilities can learn, share resources and strategies, and advocate for progress throughout their communities, helping to realize all parts of the CRPD.

Technology standards play a key role in promoting accessibility by defining feasible, consensus-backed approaches for addressing the needs of users with disabilities in a digital environment. Standards that have been accessibility-tested help counter myths about the feasibility of accessibility and demonstrate that the needs of different disability communities complement rather than contradict each other. They demonstrate that accessibility, rather than constraining innovation, instead drives innovation; that accessible interfaces can be vibrant and dynamic; and that accessible interfaces set the foundation for more inclusive interfaces for all.

The World Wide Web Consortium (n.d.) develops technologies for the web platform internationally, to ensure that the web remains open and interoperable. World Wide Web Consortium standards include HTML and hundreds of standards which support graphics, media, internationalization, payments, virtual reality, sensor networks, and automotive navigation.

Historically, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has focused more on the needs of higher-income countries. W3C is jointly hosted in North America, Europe, Japan, and China. W3C brings together thousands of dedicated technologists representing more than 400 organizations. Outreach chapters include the low-income and lower middle-income countries India, Morocco, and Senegal. W3C’s consensus process (Nevile, 2018), with multi-stakeholder participation, provides a setting in which user needs can inform and be considered alongside the interests of industry, research, education, and government, and within which any organization or individual from around the world can participate. Its commitment to a “Web for All” includes accessibility, internationalization (W3C, 2020), privacy, and security.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (n.d.) develops accessibility guidelines that are considered the authoritative international standard for web content and applications, and standards for authoring tools and user agents for the web. It coordinates accessibility work within W3C and works with hundreds of organizations to make the web more accessible for people with disabilities and older users. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) work includes ensuring that all W3C technologies support accessibility, including emerging technologies on the web.

WAI has developed guidelines (Henry, 2019b) for accessible web content and applications (Henry, 2018b), browsers (Spellman et al., 2016), and authoring tools (Henry, 2015) that support production of accessible web content and improved interoperability of mainstream technologies with assistive technologies used by people with disabilities such as screen readers and speech recognition. WAI develops resources to support improved accessibility evaluation and to promote awareness and implementation of accessibility. It coordinates with accessibility research and development, and promotes harmonized uptake of international web accessibility standards. Recent WAI work, supported by the Ford Foundation, has enabled increased outreach to people in low-income and lower middle-income countries.

Uptake of WAI’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines into governmental policies increased following the signing of the CRPD. However, many countries still have little implementation planning, monitoring, or enforcement, and therefore progress on achieving web and mobile accessibility is often slow. This is the case even in countries such as India and Estonia—which perform extensive amounts of “in-sourced” accessibility work—because there is not yet a national infrastructure supporting digital accessibility and encompassing efforts in awareness, promotion, implementation support, and monitoring.

In contrast to this, in higher-income regions such as Hong Kong, where there is an excellent infrastructure for digital accessibility going back over two decades, the policy uptake has been good due to strong awareness and technical skills among the disability community, strong promotion efforts from government, and a robust training program from computer science programs. Similarly, in South Korea, a very high level of technical development, including work on mobile accessibility, has built upon multi-stakeholder interest and support among the disability community.

Several complementary accessibility guidelines are needed to ensure accessibility of the digital environment, as described in “Essential Components of Web Accessibility” (Henry, 2018a) and below.

W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0, published in 1999, was largely focused on HTML, the primary web markup language at the time (Chisholm et al., 1999). However, this focus presented a problem for web developers, who used many other markup languages. Derivative versions of WCAG 1.0 emerged, then derivatives of those, each of which altered the meaning of the standard and created disincentives for organizations obligated to comply with conflicting versions of guidelines across different jurisdictions.

WCAG 2.0, published in 2008 (W3C, 2008), was organized around four key principles: that web content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. It was designed to be technology-neutral but also forward-compatible, and to apply equally well to HTML and to technologies that had not yet been developed. This was accomplished by having a general “normative” layer (the part to which conformance can be tested), and “informative” techniques which developers could use or even develop on their own. It was also designed to be more precisely testable, so that it would be easier to determine whether a website complied with WCAG 2.0.

In developing WCAG 2.0, W3C WAI reached out to a much broader community of accessibility experts and stakeholders around the world. For instance, WAI received feedback on integration of needs related to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, all character-based languages. Improvements included addressing issues such as improved bidirectional character rendering and incorporating pronunciation annotations. The larger and more diverse volume of comments improved the standard, establishing a stronger international consensus.

The updated WCAG 2.1 adds more provisions for some accessibility needs, including low vision; cognitive, language, and learning disabilities; and mobile (Kirkpatrick & Cooper, 2018). The expansion of mobile accessibility is important for people with disabilities in low-income and lower middle-income countries that rely heavily on mobile phones. WCAG 2.2 will add further provisions for these areas. WAI is developing next-generation guidelines with a new structure and conformance model, and plainer language where possible for improved understandability and translatability to better serve smaller language communities.

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines address accessibility support in tools used by designers and developers of web content, and are an essential complement to WCAG. Authoring tools include markup editors, graphics editors, integrated development environments, content management systems, learning management systems, and social media platforms such as wikis and blogs, which are widely used to informally create content for the web. Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0, published in 2015, aligns with WCAG 2.0 (Richards et al., 2015a). Supporting materials include “Implementing ATAG 2.0” (Richards et al., 2015b), which provides support for designers and developers in specific contexts of web content authoring.

In low-resource regions, efficient production of accessible content is especially important. China, with a vibrant technical community and one of the largest language communities in the world, is starting steps to require ATAG 2.0 (Zhang, 2018, Trans.) within its own authoring tool market.

User Agent refers to any software used to access, interact with, and render content, and includes browsers, media players, and assistive technologies. The rapid expansion of mobile applications as a means of accessing web content was one of the main motivations for updating the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines to the 2.0 version in 2015 (Spellman et al., 2016). Again, for low-resource regions heavily dependent on mobiles, effective built-in support for accessibility can help web designers and developers save time from working around the inconsistent feature support in browsers and assistive technologies that can particularly affect small language communities.

WAI Accessible Rich Internet Applications (Cooper, 2020) is a W3C (2018) technical specification that defines ways to make dynamic and interactive web and mobile applications more accessible to people with disabilities. WAI Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) addresses these barriers by, for instance, defining new ways for functionality to be provided to people using screen readers, or to people who cannot use a mouse or have limited use of gestures. Materials include WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1 (Fiers et al., 2019), which promote consistent implementations of ARIA, and a number of ARIA Application Programming Interfaces and ARIA Application Programming Interface Mappings.

Accessibility Conformance Testing Rules Format 1.0 (W3C, n.d.) defines a format for writing rules to test the accessibility of web content. These test rules encompass automated, semi-automated, and manual testing. Over time, these advances will increase automation of accessibility testing, thereby eventually supporting more automated and affordable conformance testing for under-resourced regions.

The existence of accessibility guidelines, and supporting technical and educational materials, does not automatically lead to an accessible web even in regions of the world with extensive resources. The web still has major gaps and barriers in high-income countries, but in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and in Indigenous communities, gaps can be more severe.

Achieving an accessible web relies on a combination of many different elements: guidelines, conformance testing, technical specifications that work well with assistive technologies, and more. Since digital accessibility is still not well understood in many countries, it requires local efforts to promote awareness, training to support implementation, policies to help drive uptake, and integration of accessibility requirements into organizational processes—into the design, development, and maintenance of websites and mobile applications. To date, the needs of people in under-resourced regions have not been sufficiently reflected in this ecosystem.

Accessibility is best addressed from the beginning of the design process, as part of an inclusive design approach to maximizing inclusion for all users. While accessibility focuses on ensuring equal access for people with disabilities, it also benefits people who may not currently have disabilities. Additional benefits across other stakeholder groups are addressed in WAI’s “Business Case for Digital Accessibility” (Henry, 2019a). Gathering diverse user scenarios, analyzing these, articulating the technical needs and accessibility requirements, and documenting these in standards, guidelines, and other supporting resources for designers and developers of websites, tools, and technologies requires the participation of a broad range of stakeholders from a representative global user base.

Often, local digital accessibility advocates explain that they need more background information before they can promote digital accessibility. Free online resource collections such as WAI’s site (Henry, 2020a) can help, including “Accessibility Fundamentals” (Henry, 2019c); “Planning and Policies” (Henry, 2020b); “Designing and Developing” (Henry, 2020c); “Testing and Evaluating” (Henry, 2019b); “Teaching and Advocating” (Henry, 2020c); and “Standards and Guidelines”.

Accessibility advocates in under-resourced regions report that video introductions can be an easier way to learn and to share information about digital accessibility. Contributing to the popularity of “WAI Perspectives” (Abou-Zahra, 2016) is a series of one-minute videos showing different aspects of the disability user experience as well as benefits of accessibility to other users. Additional video resources include the “Video Introduction to Web Accessibility and W3C Standards” (Abou-Zahra et al., 2019), and a TEDxMIT video, “Creating an Accessible Digital Future” (Brewer & TEDxMIT, 2019), which explains the impact that accessibility can have on people’s lives, and why good implementation is so important. Other resources that can serve as easy on-ramps for accessibility include “How People with Disabilities Use the Web” (Abou-Zahra & Brewer, 2017), which provides a window into the user experience of people with disabilities; the massive open online course “Introduction to Web Accessibility” (Abou-Zahra 2019), which provides a free overview on web accessibility; and “How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference)” (Eggert & Abou-Zahra, 2019), an implementation guide for developers.

Several elements of the web accessibility ecosystem may be especially important for strengthening digital accessibility in under-resourced regions. These include translation of accessibility resources, closing stakeholder gaps, capacity building, and policy development, addressed in the next sections.

English has to date been the common language for most computer coding and digital standards development. However, progress on accessibility depends on many channels of uptake in addition to developer implementation of technical standards. Uptake of accessibility standards requires widespread awareness of the need for accessibility; awareness of relevant policies and of relevant technical standards and guidelines; and the ability to use technical support materials and accessibility conformance testing materials. For diverse stakeholders from different language communities, it is essential that these materials are available in languages other than English.

Disability advocates in low-resource regions often note that their efforts must be spread across a great many survival-level topics, including access to housing, transportation, local education, healthcare, employment opportunities, and civic participation. Among these survival-level priorities, the concept of digital accessibility can initially seem like a luxury. However, digital accessibility rapidly becomes a survival issue once local connectivity improves and critical information and interactions move online.

Disability advocates sometimes report not feeling confident about what to advocate for with regard to digital accessibility, or knowledgeable enough to educate other advocates on the topic. For disability advocates in under-resourced regions, their disability may mean less opportunity for advanced education and exposure to mainstream digital technologies and assistive technologies, and less opportunity to learn English compared to people from other stakeholder groups in their communities, making it harder to learn these materials on their own.

At an international gathering in Mongolia of disability advocates from countries in the Asia-Pacific region, we heard how important it is for advocates to have materials about web accessibility available in local languages throughout the region, to allow them to more easily pass these along to others in the advocacy community and to allies in other communities.

For some languages this requires technical improvements in the ability to render specific scripts or characters on the web. In other cases, it requires more specialized pronunciation rules. W3C has been working on both of these kinds of support. We have heard similar comments from developers in Argentina, who have said that they need key web accessibility materials available in Spanish, and in Brazil, where government promoters of web accessibility realized early on that Portuguese was an essential starting place for promoting interest within the developer community. In the advanced web industry in China, there is interest in an authorized translation of ARIA for accessibility of highly interactive websites, and an interest in the ATAG to support Chinese-language production tools for more efficient production of accessible websites.

A volunteer community of translators has helped make a limited number of W3C standards available in languages other than the official English version over the years. Initially, translations of W3C materials were prepared without a formal review process, occasionally resulting in disagreements between different organizations within the same language community as to which was the authoritative translation. W3C’s “Policy for Authorized W3C Translations” (Brewer & Herman, 2020) encourages reviews by different stakeholder groups using an established process for resolving discrepancies between translations. This policy, however, is primarily applied to standards, not to the many educational and implementation support materials needed for uptake of accessibility guidelines which require careful monitoring in order to ensure translations of a consistent quality.

To address the need for higher-quality translations, W3C is updating and extending the translation policy to be applicable to technical support and educational resources as well. To improve discoverability of translations, WAI has updated the infrastructure for posting translations on its website so that the available translations for a given resource can be directly accessed from that resource page, as well as from language-specific reference lists (WAI Expanding Access Project, n.d.). WAI also improved support for bidirectionality in page views and in navigation menus, so that Arabic and other languages would render properly.

WAI recruited volunteer translators to expand translations for an initial set of five priority WAI documents in each of the six major UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Some WAI resources, such as the WCAG, have translations in more than 20 languages already, though most WAI resources have only a few translations. WAI will next expand the pool of translators to less widely spoken languages.

WAI is developing guidance to facilitate the work of translators. Because of the specialized technical vocabulary in WAI materials, we are exploring approaches such as translating glossaries of accessibility terminology that can be useful in supporting translations of multiple documents. This approach helps support development of consensus on appropriate translations of words referring to disability, since terminology relating to disabilities remains stigmatizing in many language communities, and neutral alternatives referring to different aspects of disability may not be widely known yet.

The complexity of the technical standards themselves also creates barriers to translation. WAI is therefore also developing guidance for writers of specifications and educational materials, to encourage the use of plain language in order to improve translatability of these resources.

Thanks to efforts from people from many stakeholder groups, substantial progress has been made in digital accessibility standards over the past two decades. This effort has included contributions from industry, disability communities, developers, evaluators, research, government, education, and more. Nevertheless, there are gaps in who is represented in standards discussions, and who gets to have input into priorities and during the standards development process.

People with disabilities have frequently spoken up about their needs with regard to digital accessibility, sometimes despite technology designers and developers being disinterested in their feedback, but this is starting to change. Technology companies have increased their hiring of people with disabilities, realizing that it can be a competitive advantage to have employees onboard who have knowledge and experience about human variation in the usage of digital technologies. Consequently, people with disabilities are having more direct opportunities to bring their voices into all stages of technology development.

Employment of people with disabilities in the technology field also allows contribution of their accessibility expertise to standards organizations such as W3C. Industry representatives, regardless of whether they have disabilities, become involved in accessibility standards development for a variety of reasons. Initially, much of the industry participation in accessibility work was on a volunteer basis, and most participation was from upper-income countries. W3C member organizations now more frequently cover their employees’ work on accessibility standards. Motivations may include contributing to the quality of accessibility standards; learning more about accessibility so as to improve the customer experience; improving the work environment with regard to diversity and inclusion; or enhancing organizational standing on social responsibility indicators.

The quality of accessibility standards is enhanced by having different perspectives at the table. Researchers can delve into novel accessibility challenges. Web designers and developers can develop and refine reusable web components. Educators and content developers can develop tutorials that speak clearly to other developers.

Despite the increased diversity of stakeholders at the standards table, many communities’ voices are still missing from the accessibility standards development conversation, and this includes voices from low-income and lower middle-income countries and Indigenous communities. The absence of people from under-resourced regions impacts prioritization of issues in standards development.

The Web Foundation’s Web Index (Brudvig, 2020) describes the growing inequality of the web, including the extent to which worldwide economic differences underlie disparities in access to the web. These same disparities in access to the web are paralleled in differential engagement patterns in technology standards development. W3C’s member organizations—of which there are over 450—are largely, though not entirely, drawn from higher-income countries. Participation in W3C working groups and task forces, and in community groups—the settings in which technical challenges are identified and approaches to address these are incubated—reflect this pattern of lower participation from low-income and lower middle-income countries. For people with disabilities in Indigenous communities, there may be barriers to establishing connectivity (National Congress of American Indians, 2016; U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2016) to the internet and the web, though attention to connectivity has begun to increase through the Internet Society’s Indigenous Connectivity Summits (Internet Society, n.d.).

Uptake of WCAG 2.0 into national policy requirements shows similar disparities, with progress to date mainly in higher-income countries, as evidenced in W3C WAI’s listing of “Web Accessibility Laws and Policies” (Mueller et al., 2018) and 3Play Media’s map of WCAG uptake (Enamorado, 2019), which primarily show uptake in higher-income countries. In many countries, availability of authorized W3C translations of WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 in national languages is a necessary precursor to uptake. Yet beyond the six major UN languages, WAI resources are still more often translated into languages used in higher-income countries.

Standards organizations are sometimes structured around who is already at the table and who already has a history of contributing, rather than around a deliberate effort to diversify stakeholder representation. Participation can become a self-reinforcing cycle.

It is important that standards organizations create a more welcoming table for people from around the world interested in helping to shape technology development and accessibility standardization. Some international standards organizations already have provisions to encourage more geographically diverse participation. W3C has always had a diversity of participation modes: email, collaborative web development, teleconferences, and face-to-face meetings. Efforts to diversify these further include developing easier-to-use review tools, geographically rotating meeting locations and times, and using captions which help participants who are less fluent in English, as well as those who are deaf or hard of hearing. For a limited number of people without other means, W3C waives registration fees and covers the costs of travel and/or accommodation. W3C’s annual Technical Plenary meetings can be an excellent opportunity for people to meet standards developers working in many different working groups across W3C, yet can be expensive to get to and stay at. The expansion of virtual meetings due to COVID-19 restrictions have ironically leveled the playing field with regard to participation from under-resourced regions.

The opportunity to participate in making standards for the technology industry has not come easily for people with disabilities, just as it has not for women in the tech field, for people of color, and for people from lower-income regions. While there are have been improvements over the years, the needs of people with disabilities are often misunderstood, and have often been dismissed, and sometimes even mocked, in a standards setting. These issues have all been barriers to more diverse participation, and have eventually been taken up in direct conversations, leading to incremental improvements over time. More work is needed.

As people with disabilities working in the tech field, the authors can vouch that the lack of an accessible infrastructure across all dimensions—the built environment, transportation sector, communications—makes it difficult for people with disabilities to gather, to learn from each other, and to take action collectively on accessibility issues in the tech field.

These issues are often exacerbated in low-resource regions. For both authors, it has at times meant a lack of means to travel safely and accessibly, and even to access venues in which we have been invited to present about accessibility. This lack of an accessible infrastructure can similarly become a barrier for people from regions not currently represented in W3C WAI work, who are trying to join the international discussion; and it means a steep learning curve for people trying to join the discussion.

Nevertheless, the increasing use of online environments has the potential to broaden our ability to network across geographic regions. We have developed many more “easy on-ramp” resources from which to learn about accessibility, and opened more avenues to get involved in building an accessible digital future.

Sample use cases and user scenarios embedded in technical and educational resources are often not inclusive and may be biased toward situations from higher-income countries. Standards developers may design new standards and technologies with the assumption that these will be deployed in areas with high-bandwidth uninterrupted connectivity and a reliable electrical grid, whereas people with disabilities in under-resourced regions cannot take these qualities for granted.

Incorporating examples that reflect people’s experiences from around the world can help educational materials be more relevant to people in more regions of the world. For instance, in some LMICs, access to personal computers remains limited, but everyone has a mobile phone. Therefore, including examples of mobile phone usage and/or examples that reflect the lives of people in more rural communities can increase the relevance of resources to local communities.

With the increase in remote work, including low-cost and no-cost teleconferencing and video conferencing, it has become easier to establish a sense of engagement and shared work community—instead of having to board a plane, which can be expensive and difficult for people from low-income and lower middle-income countries, as well as for people with disabilities. Given the difficulties, cost, and time associated with international travel, more accessible and reliable remote participation options could greatly expand participation in international standards work.

Often, though, these remote options also have accessibility barriers. Video conference controls may not work well for people who are blind or have low vision. It may be difficult to integrate streaming captions, or to display sign language interpreting next to shared content or slides.

Advanced technologies for telepresence and virtual gatherings could support transcending physical location for people with disabilities in low-income and lower middle-income countries. Telepresence devices enable a remote participant to visit a location and use a self-propelled device to “visit” an office or other location and move through space at the remote location under their direct control. These still have barriers, including bandwidth and reliability issues, and will only work for people with disabilities if these technologies are developed with accessibility in mind.

In higher-income countries, a variety of accessibility skills and complementary roles evolved gradually over time: accessibility experts, tech-savvy disability advocates, web designers, developers and evaluators, software and app developers, policy makers, and more. But opportunities to develop a similar range of experts and organizations have been absent in other areas. Given the extent of technical and educational material that has already been developed, there is now an opportunity for local communities to deliberately plan to develop these skills at an accelerated pace, by drawing on international resources, without starting from scratch or recreating the wheel.

The saying “Nothing About Us Without Us” has long been popular in the disability rights movement, and applies to technology development and standards development as much as to other things that affect the lives of people with disabilities. In the case of standards development, it is vital to have users’ voices involved in articulating use cases, user requirements, the suitability of potential solutions, and their design and development.

Co-training approaches that deliberately bring together participants from different stakeholder groups can be a good way to deliver local capacity-building training that is inclusive of people with disabilities. Combinations of stakeholder groups or roles can be deliberately sought; for instance, co-training initiatives could be focused on training designers, developers, and evaluators together. Policymakers and disability advocates could be trained together so as to build shared understanding, goals, and partnerships. If engineers train alongside people with disabilities, engineers get a direct view of the barriers that people with disabilities must contend with on a daily basis, including when trying to use today’s technologies. Advocates and allies can learn how the design and development process works and get insight into gaps in developers’ understanding of design requirements of people with disabilities.

The Inclusive Africa (2020) webinar and conference series organized by InABLE in Kenya, has highlighted the stories and experiences of people with disabilities and allies working on accessibility in industry, to build a community with shared advocacy and technical understanding. They have started with basics such as the importance of equal access in Africa; understanding digital accessibility; details of web accessibility; mobile accessibility; inclusive design; and more. This has elevated the work of digital accessibility proponents from different parts of Africa, strengthened ties with international industry representatives, and helped those representatives gain a better understanding of needs in some under-resourced areas of Africa.

Human rights, including disability rights, have evolved since the early work of W3C WAI. In 2006, the CRPD was passed and quickly adopted by many countries around the world, driving increased interest in web accessibility guidelines as a means for addressing rights defined in the CRPD, especially those supporting access to information and information technologies.

Even before that, the market for accessible ICT had been impacted by a procurement legislation approach which started in 1986 with enactment of U.S. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and which was subsequently taken up in Europe. Section 508 required that U.S. federal agencies were responsible for ensuring that ICT that they developed, procured, maintained, and used must be accessible for people with disabilities so as not to exclude current or future employees from being able to become part of the federal workforce. It also included an obligation that agencies’ public-facing technologies should be accessible, so that people with disabilities among the public would not be excluded from access to public information.

W3C’s WCAG 1.0 were referenced in an update to Section 508 (U.S. Access Board, n.d.) in 1999. Section 508 modified some provisions of WCAG 1.0, creating some non-aligned requirements. Section 508 was updated again in 2017 (U.S. Access Board, 2018), harmonizing more precisely with W3C’s WCAG 2.0. It was expanded to apply more broadly to ICT, including hardware and software such as printers and automated teller machines. W3C obtained endorsement of WCAG 2.0 as an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard 40500 (International Organization for Standardization, 2019) in 2012, which has led to additional international uptake of WCAG 2.0.

The European Union pursued a similar approach to accessibility procurement requirements, resulting in 2014 in the European Norm (EN) 301 549 (eSSENTIAL Accessibility, 2019), now aligned in scope with the updated U.S. Section 508 Technical Standard. Given that this adoption of WCAG 2.0 for non-web contexts had not initially been envisioned by W3C, some technical clarifications were required and were addressed during the standardization process in Europe. The most recent version of EN 301 549 was revised to align with WCAG 2.1, and to meet specific requirements of the “European Web Accessibility Directive” (European Commission Accessibility, Multilingualism, & Safer Internet Team, 2019).

Many countries have developed laws or policies that reference or adopt W3C’s WCAG, either directly or by referencing ISO IEC 40500, or the broader EN 301 549. W3C maintains a reference listing of such laws and policies from around the world (Mueller et al., 2018), now including policies in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Some governments have developed local web accessibility standards. When these diverge technically from international standards, they can create barriers to sharing training and technical assistance materials across borders and difficulty maintaining local standards over time as technologies evolve. For organizations that must meet different guidelines in different countries, this fragmentation has the outcome of increasing compliance costs for web accessibility, instead of accelerating accessibility uptake by enabling sharing of training resources and authoring and evaluation tools. Feedback on existing accessibility standards and input into new guidelines under development are therefore important to ensure that future versions of accessibility guidelines address the needs of all communities, including those in under-resourced regions.

There are many potential barriers to policy uptake of digital accessibility in under-resourced regions and communities, and these parallel combinations of barriers are mentioned earlier in this chapter with regard to the implementation of web accessibility guidelines. Some barriers may be more common in under-resourced regions, and certain policy issues may need particular attention at a local level.

Uptake of accessibility guidelines into national and local policies is dependent on development of an understanding of the need and approaches among individuals who are positioned to affect policy changes. This usually takes multiple years, and this continuity can sometimes be more difficult to maintain in LMICs, leading to slower development of accessibility policies in under-resourced regions.

Abrupt changes of government can interrupt continuity, as the authors have, for instance, observed in Tunisia and Egypt in recent years, where WAI had been active in promoting awareness and uptake of WAI guidelines. In these circumstances, a deep network of people informed about digital accessibility across multiple stakeholder groups (government, disability community, industry, research, and education) can be especially important in maintaining a resilient network of accessibility proponents within different sectors of society. In some countries this has enabled progress on policy uptake to resume relatively quickly following social or governmental disruptions.

Even while international standards harmonization can serve as an accessibility accelerator, certain issues may, however, benefit from local policy development. To take the example of education, in meeting the goals of Article 24 of the CRPD (2006d), which defines educational rights for people with disabilities, it is important to consider the role of technology in educating students with disabilities—and to plan for that even before digital learning has entered local classrooms.

For instance, countries whose educational systems integrate disabled and non-disabled students together in the classroom sometimes maintain a practice of taking students with disabilities out of their regular classrooms for specialized instruction for a few hours each day. If this practice coincides with classes on science, technology, engineering, and math, students with disabilities may be deprived of learning the technical skills that would allow them to help design their digital future because of assumptions that they do not have the interest, aptitude, or need for the science, technology, engineering, and math curriculum.

From the perspective of local policies, it is therefore essential to ensure that science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curricula and classrooms are accessible for students with disabilities, and that adequate time and resources are allocated for making the curriculum accessible. When educational personnel are made aware of the need for an accessible curriculum in advance, including for STEM, and when training and resources are made available to ensure students with disabilities are accommodated, students can have equitable educational opportunities. Moreover, they can acquire skills that will enable them to build the accessibility solutions of the future. Ensuring opportunities for students with disabilities to learn about technology and accessibility can help build a generation of digital accessibility advocates. This can fuel a virtuous cycle of expanding capabilities and opportunities, rather than perpetuating a cycle of inaccessibility that perpetuates exclusion of people with disabilities. If we plan for digital inclusion now, we can help build an accessible digital future, sector by sector, including in under-resourced communities.