Showing We CARE: Consider Accessibility as a Requirement

 

How Akkodis drives progress of accessibility through innovation

The potential of digital technologies has yet to be fully realized. Worldwide, an estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, that equates to one in six of the world’s population. They still face barriers in everyday life and online, considering only a fraction of websites and other digital tools are fully accessible. Akkodis engineering and software experts are exploring the potential for emerging technologies to increase inclusivity.

Through three main axes–universal design, digital accessibility, and innovation for inclusion – Akkodis aims to drive forward progress on accessibility, making sure it’s an essential consideration in all new projects, whether digital or offline.

CARE-ing about accessibility

“A few months ago, we launched a dedicated program related to accessibility called CARE: Consider Accessibility as a Requirement,” explains Mathieu Jeudy, Innovation Delivery Manager for Smart Mobility & Accessibility at Akkodis. “Our mindset is one of ‘universal design’– the ambition here is to make our clients and also the business managers at Akkodis aware of the importance of accessibility and consider it right from the start when defining a new product, whether digital or physical.”

Designing a product with accessibility in mind from the start makes it much easier and more efficient to ensure that it is truly accessible.

“It’s a bit like accessibility in a building,” says Kevin Bustamante, Digital Accessibility Specialist at Akkodis. “At the design phase for a new building nowadays, you plan lifts, accessible toilets, and so on. The architect should take accessibility into account from the beginning–adding these elements once the building exists would be more complicated and costly. When you’re designing a website or an app, it should be the same process.”

 

Digital technology, applications, and websites are all an extensive and growing part of our daily lives. However, only a tiny fraction of them take accessibility into account. 

For Akkodis, which prides itself on the diversity and inclusivity of its workforce, supporting its customers in implementing accessibility principles is a key part of its inclusivity strategy.

Bustamante and Jeudy, alongside their teams, are determined to improve accessibility for people with disabilities, and Akkodis is not alone in promoting the need for greater focus on accessibility throughout society.

In Europe, the European Commission’s 10-year disability strategy aims to ensure that people with disabilities can experience full social and economic inclusion and live free from discrimination.

Digital inclusion will also be an essential part of the European Union’s broader digital strategy for the years to come, with efforts underway to ensure that everybody can contribute to and benefit from the digital world.

At a global level, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), govern how web content should be presented to be accessible to all and at a national level individual countries have enshrined these guidelines in their laws.

Digital accessibility

If you’ve tried to catch a train, go to a concert or pick up a parcel without using a mobile phone app, QR code or digital ticket in the past few years, you’ll be familiar with the extent to which digital technologies are permeating more and more parts of society.

European statistics show that almost 90% of people access the internet every week. But while the digital transformation of society opens up myriad opportunities, only a fraction of all websites–an estimated 10-20%–are accessible to people with disabilities. In an increasingly digital world, that lack of online accessibility creates barriers for people with disabilities.

Raising awareness

“I think companies are realizing that this is important and that they should do something,” Jeudy says. “So that’s why one of our axes is about making clients aware of the accessibility issue.”

Apart from being the right thing to do, thinking about accessibility from the start makes business sense: it’s much easier, and more cost-effective, to respect accessibility guidelines from the design phase of a website or app. Making an existing website accessible involves a lengthy analysis of exactly which pages are not accessible, before the changes can be made.

Companies are wising up to that need to make their websites and apps accessible to everyone, by respecting accessibility rules based on international guidelines, explains Bustamante.

“I work with designers, developers, engineers and project managers to make the digital solutions we develop for our clients accessible to people with disabilities and to older people,” he says.

Color contrasts

Those guidelines take in everything from color palettes that need to have sufficient contrast to be visible to color-blind users, to alternative text for images or transcription or subtitles for videos.

“The wording also needs to be comprehensible to people with cognitive difficulties. The guidelines state that websites should have an option to turn off animations that automatically flick between images, in case of epilepsy,” Bustamante says.

Clients can opt for a service that takes in advice, workshops and training, along with the all-important accessibility audits to make sure clients have put into place the accessibility principles successfully. Or they can go for a turnkey solution in which they define the end digital product and Akkodis delivers it, accessibility and all.

Working together

Being able to work closely with Akkodis research colleagues and other branches of the wider group is important for Akkodis digital accessibility, Bustamante says.“Akkodis Research can take a step back, brainstorm, and imagine how to come up with a solution.”

One good example came through an online CV generator product developed by parent company Adecco. “A visually impaired person could use it but would need someone to check their CV to ensure it looked OK. I went to the head of digital at Adecco and suggested making the CV generator accessible so people with disabilities could generate their own CV autonomously. She said ‘great, let’s go’, so we went to Akkodis Research and talked to them about integrating AI into the product to add new functionalities. We worked together to find a solution. It’s in use in France now, and we’re going to deploy it globally.”

How did the CARE program come about?

Kevin Bustamante: With more and more digital technologies everywhere, in everyday life–even in household appliances such as coffee machines or vacuum cleaners–accessibility is a real challenge for people with disabilities. Mathieu and I decided to come up with universal design guidelines aimed at making these objects accessible. In the short- and medium-term our objective is to get everyone round the table to develop design rules that we can apply to these types of objects.

How much demand is there for digital accessibility services? Is it growing?

Mathieu Jeudy: Digital accessibility is an important part of how we support our clients. We can make recommendations and share our know-how. For now, only a small proportion of applications and websites respect accessibility guidelines so there is plenty of work to be done.

Kevin Bustamante: Accessibility isn’t a new subject but it’s true that we have been talking about it a lot more in recent years in the digital world. That’s partly because the population is aging, which is making digital accessibility an even more important requirement. But accessibility is a process and there is still work to do. For example, internally we work with our commercial teams so that they understand that part of our duty is to make sure our customers are aware of the need for accessibility. There’s an ethical dimension in selling this kind of solution, it’s not like selling a basic engineering services solution.

Does your research work influence the digital accessibility services you offer clients, and vice versa?

Mathieu Jeudy: Yes, there are two sides to what we do. As part of the CARE program, we’re working on universal design and innovation for inclusion. We also offer our clients digital accessibility services. The two approaches feed into each other. With one client, we were talking about what they needed and what training we could offer, and they mentioned that text transcription of videos took time. That observation eventually led to the launch of a project, in conjunction with Akkodis Research, to use AI to make video and audio accessible.

Do the internal values at Akkodis help drive home the message that inclusivity is vital?

Kevin Bustamante: I think so, we’re a company in which human values are celebrated, not just a digital company. Our domain is the digital world, so making use of the digital to help the human makes sense and is one of our strengths. On our internal handicap and diversity policy, I think we’re ahead. We’re all convinced about the need for inclusivity and accessibility, but the challenge is working every day to make sure these ideas and processes are made a reality.

How do you ensure you respect the principles of universal design?

Mathieu Jeudy: When we design a product, we always start with workshops and define personas that could find the product relevant, so those workshops can include people with disabilities. We talk to people to identify the needs of each persona, and how to address those needs.

 

INNOVATING FOR INCLUSIVITY

Three Akkodis Research projects, with very different approaches and aims, make use of a wide range of technologies, and show how the company’s expertise has the potential to help improve everyday life for people with disabilities.

ELOCA

The ELOCA app translates sign language, using a speech synthesizer. The app uses gesture recognition from a camera input, and artificial intelligence to transform the gestures into audible text.

“We noticed that some people had difficulty conversing with other people because of speech or language problems. We wanted to help people understand them even if they don’t know sign language,” Jeudy says. “We built ELOCA from scratch, defining and developing the features.”

While the app can already translate some American sign language into audible text, work is underway on integrating French sign language. The users of the app will help it expand its scope, Jeudy says. “We will provide users with a platform which they can record gestures, to train our AI algorithms.” Akkodis is working on a proof of concept for the ELOCA technology, a first step before possible commercialization, which would probably be in partnership with another company.

BionicoHand

Technologies are moving fast in the world of prosthetics. In contrast to the aesthetic prostheses that simply offer a natural appearance without much functionality, myoelectric prostheses are powered by electrical signals sent via electrodes placed on the skin. They allow a person with a missing limb to control the movement of their prosthesis and regain autonomy in daily life.

There are obstacles, though, to wider adoption: myoelectric prostheses are often expensive and heavy, making them hard to use.

Akkodis has been working with My Human Kit, an association that is the brainchild of a young man, Nicolas Huchet, whose journey to becoming a prosthetics expert began with frustration at the limitations of his own low-tech prosthesis. Huchet teamed up with a group of technology enthusiasts to try to create an affordable, user-friendly open source prosthetic hand as an alternative to the basic prosthesis he was using, the start of a decade-long journey that led to the launch of the BionicoHand project.

The project brought together different partners to make the myoelectric prosthesis a reality–and a reality that is designed with input from amputees to be affordable, easy to charge and repair and user friendly. It uses innovative technologies such as 3D printing and including an opposable thumb mechanism with electronic components, sensors, motorization and battery.

Akkodis got involved as a skills sponsor, offering its technological expertise to help drive forward developments on the prosthetic hand’s battery system. The next step for Akkodis will be providing support on the challenge of making the prosthesis lighter and therefore more comfortable for users.

ABILEO

Akkodis worked with Auticiel, a French company that specializes in using technology to increase inclusivity for adults and children with disabilities, on the ABILEO project.

In the workplace, Auticiel’s tablet-based applications help people with cognitive difficulties gain autonomy in their daily tasks and learn new skills, improving their employment prospects.

Akkodis collaborated with Auticiel on cloud-based services and tablet applications for the ABILEO app, which is now being tested near Lyon, France, at the Jacques Chavent center, an ‘ESAT’–an establishment that provides work and training to people with disabilities.

The facility includes a training center as well as a cafeteria where workers from local businesses come for lunch. People with disabilities staff the canteen and can also undergo training for qualifications in the training center, setting them up to be able to find jobs elsewhere. The tablet-based app helps the ESAT workers learn new everyday tasks and master skills that increase their employability, as well as developing their autonomy at work and facilitating communication between the workers and their supervisors.