When I began working with the IBM Accessibility team a few years ago, I asked a smart IBMer what the team needed to do to help IBMers to create more accessible products. His response was that we needed to stop telling people that creating inaccessible products would get them sued. Instead, we needed to get them to take the matter to heart. They should be empathic, or even better – excited, about making their product better for everyone. So, we took a positive approach. Last year we released our IBM Equal Access Toolkit and introduced the idea of levels for accessibility. Start here. Get a little better. Finish with an excellent product. Our Accessibility checker provides folks a dashboard with a little jolt of support with the percentage of their code that is accessible. Fix the issues and your score gets better. Since last year’s release our website at ibm.com/able receives an average of a thousand visitors a day. They have downloaded our checker from the Chrome and Firefox stores over 8000 times. They have used the continuous integration version of the checker over 670,000 times. Positivity changes hearts and minds and culture. We still have a long way to go. But as we celebrate the 31st anniversary of the American with Disabilities Act, I wanted to step back and celebrate how far we’ve come. I’m asking you to take a step forward, though, and use the Toolkit with your team. Have your developers validate their code with our free Accessibility Checker.

More from Business transformation

Accelerating AI & Innovation: The future of banking depends on core modernization

4 min read - In the rapidly evolving landscape of financial services, embracing AI and digital innovation at scale has become imperative for banks to stay competitive. With the power of AI and machine learning, financial institutions can leverage predictive analytics, anomaly detection and shared learning models to enhance system stability, detect fraud and drive superior customer-centric experiences. As we step into 2023, the focus has shifted to digital financial services, encompassing embedded finance, generative AI and the migration of super apps from China…

4 min read

Keep it simple: How to succeed at business transformation using behavioral economics

3 min read - Business leaders often think it’s impossible to predict the outcome of a transformation effort—whether employees will embrace a new process, for example, or how customers will react to a new service. They’re missing out on a secret of change management, says IBM Global Managing Partner Jesus Mantas: “You really can predict, for the most part, why people do what they do.” The answers, he says, come from ​​behavioral economics. In his role overseeing Business Transformation Services for​​ IBM Consulting, Mantas…

3 min read

How Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) accelerates enterprise modernization initiatives on cloud, delivering business application innovation

3 min read - When it comes to driving large technology transformation on Cloud, leveraging existing investments, and optimizing open innovation within the larger ecosystem with a hybrid cloud platform, IBM Consulting™ offers several learnings to help organizations address the architecture and technology challenge.  Consider large financial services organization going through core banking modernization. The core banking application landscape involves multiple applications (both legacy and custom off-the-shelf) that are integrated and surfaced across multiple customer experiences, including mobile. The goal of modernizing such a large…

3 min read

IBM Consulting unveils Center of Excellence for generative AI

4 min read - IBM Consulting has established a Center of Excellence for generative AI. It stands alongside IBM Consulting’s existing global AI and Automation practice, which includes 21,000 data and AI consultants who have conducted over 40,000 enterprise client engagements. The Center of Excellence (CoE) already has more than 1,000 consultants with specialized generative AI expertise that are engaging with a global set of clients to drive productivity in IT operations and core business processes like HR or marketing, elevate their customer experiences…

4 min read