Our mission is to make the web more accessible. There are two motivations for us. One is the 20% of people who require assistive technology to navigate the web. This amounts to more than 1 billion people worldwide.
The web has become critical infrastructure for survival. It has grown to be more than information and entertainment for all of us. It is how we pay our bills, how we search for jobs, how we hire people, how we find work, how we present ourselves to the world and how we communicate with our loved ones. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web thirty years ago and he insisted it be made available to everyone. It is a great human achievement and physical disability should not preclude access.
The web evolves so quickly it is difficult for even the most diligent technologists to keep up. As programming languages evolve and devices improve adherence to universal standards often gets left behind. Regulating standards in such an environment has proven difficult. But accessibility standards, similar to standards in data privacy, are fundamental and their implementation improves the web for all of us. This brings us to our second motivation – the future.
It’s impossible to say what the web will be in fifty years. But whatever new exciting innovations occur, we will be fighting for them to be accessible. The future of the web will be determined in part by inventors and visionaries. History has shown these individuals are often unique. In fact, many of them have struggled with disabilities and in that struggle have created innovations that benefit us all.
This was true from the very earliest days of the Internet. Vint Cerf, author of the first TCP protocols and inventor of email, was born deaf. His desire to create a better form of communication paved the way for everything that happens online today.
When Steve Jobs talked about his inspiration to create Apple, he gave all the credit to the Blue Box. This was a device he bought on the street that played tones to hack pay phones for free telephone calls. Jobs said there would be no Apple without the Blue Box. The device was created by one of the early “phone phreaks” and arguably one of the first hackers in history, a man who would later change his name to Joybubbles. Joybubbles was born blind and was obsessed with the telephone from an early age. He figured out how the computers running the phone system were communicating with each other and created the Blue Box to disrupt the system.
These are just two examples of people with disabilities providing innovations that benefit the entire human race. There are many more.
We are committed to making the web accessible because it’s the right thing to do, but also because the next great innovator may very well require assistive technology to navigate the web. If it is not accessible for them, their innovation will never reach us.
Contact
- Philadelphia, pa
- info@perspectivetester.com
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