Listen to this articleaccessiBe uses AI to make websites fully accessible to users with disabilities. It’s a quick, effortless, affordable, and customizable solution that turns any website into one that is compliant with WCAG 2.1 guidelines. Here’s a transcript of our recent interview with Shir Ekerling, named one of Forbes 30 Under 30, and the CEO and co-founder of accessiBe.
Q: What led you to come up with the idea of accessiBe?
A: I was a co-owner of a marketing design and web development company in 2015 when I found out that a new law was about to come into play. This law would require us to make every website we build or work with is accessible to people with disabilities. We were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to afford to make all our websites accessible, but that if we didn’t, we could be sued for building a non-accessible site. We thought our whole income was going to disappear.
As we researched the issue, aside from the legal implications, we also realized how much people with disabilities are excluded from online services. Our worry turned into empathy, but we also felt for (SMBs) that can’t afford to make their websites accessible. We set out to use our tech know-how to fix things for everyone — web designers, people with disabilities, and SMB owners.
We spent months consulting with people with disabilities, lawyers, and accessibility experts to come up with a solution. We launched our product in March 2018 and by August, we knew that we had successfully built the only technological system in the world that can make websites fully accessible without manual intervention.
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Q: Which businesses can use accessiBe?
A: Every single business can use accessiBe. It’s ideal for everyone, from huge corporations to sole proprietors. SMB owners love it because they can’t afford to pay the usual cost of making their website accessible manually, but if they get sued for having a non-accessible site, they could their whole business. Without accessiBe, making a website accessible is incredibly expensive.
Big corporations can and do use accessiBe because they have a complicated and extensive web presence across multiple platforms, and they need to make sure that every site and web app keeps up with accessibility requirements.
It’s also ideal for web design and development agencies. Because we began our careers as web designers and developers, we think that these agencies have a huge responsibility to promote web accessibility. Agencies are the ones that create and maintain most of the world’s websites, so they need a way to quickly and easily make sites accessible. And it’s not just large agencies; because accessiBe is affordable and easy to use, freelance designers and developers can use it too, to offer an accessible solution to their clients.
Q: Why would someone choose accessiBe?
A: There are 3 main reasons: it’s affordable, effortless and keeps the business owners protected 24/7.
Affordable – unlike manual or semi-automatic accessibility solutions, our solution is fully automated. This, in return, allows us to drastically cut costs. Manual solutions can take several weeks, sometimes even months, to finish. They usually include a designated engineer and accessibility consultant, all adding to the costs of the project.
Effortless – it takes just one line of code and a 5-minutes installation to run our solution. The website will become fully accessible within 48-hours without any further interventions.
Protection – our solution scans websites 24/7, making sure that any new content that is uploaded to the website is accessible. Again, without any manual intervention.
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Q: What are your plans for the future of accessiBe?
A: We have big dreams, not just for the future of accessiBe, but for the future of the internet. Our vision is to make the entire internet accessible for everyone by 2025.
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