Why Accessibility?

Pragati Sharma: So let me first get you well with what is accessibility and why do we need it? So starting of with device, so whenever we talk about something being accessible, it simply means that it is easily understandable and easily obtainable. So if I say that I want to make a platform which is accessible, it would simply mean that everybody around the world should be able to access it with or without disabilities. Also, 20% of the world population is disabled, so that makes a huge part of the entire user base and we definitely need to be cognizant about their needs as well. Let me just give you a very relatable example of how accessibility is not only targeted to a specific group, but on a holistic level. It increases the user experience by multiple. So you would have seen wherever we have staircases, we have a RUMP adjacent to that. So the primary motive of that RUMP is for people who travel while with .... But whenever you go to subways, you would see that more than 50% of the population is using RUM instead of the staircases going up and going down. So why is that happening? So the RUM which was actually made to solve an accessibility pinpoint. Essentially increased the user experience and people are more happier using the RUM instead of the stairs because using stairs like is a lot of effort for them. So in a similar fashion, let's jump onto the other aspect of it, which is why do we need accessibility? Again for this, I would give you a real-world example. So there is a very famous streaming company. I would not be taking the name, but in 2016, a heavy lawsuit was actually filed against this company because it did not have the closed caption. So this lawsuit was filed by the National Association of Deaf because their community and the people who could not hear would actually not able to absorb the content on that streaming website. And because of this, the company had to actually include a cost of $750,000 and they were made to sign a contract which said that within two years they need to make 100% of the content with closed captioning by incorporating closed captioning to their content. So in this example, Title three of ADA, which is Americans with Disabilities Act, was violated because of this entire lawsuit happened at the first place. So this was something which is very specific to America. But then different nations have different federal laws. Supposedly UK, it has its own federal law. It goes by the name of Discrimination Disabilities Act. Then in India, we have another law, which is the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. So now, wherever you are, wherever you're deploying your product, you need to make sure that you are actually abiding to the laws of that particular nationality. And this is what makes accessibility all the more important for us to abide to. As quality analysts, we need to make sure that our products are accessible by one and all at the same time. We need to make sure that we are able to give a faster feedback for any kind of accessibility violation so that the team is able to handle that in a timely fashion. And at the end, it's very important for us to automate this entire process so that the overall regression becomes way more easy for us. So let's dive right in.