Companies love to get press for disability tech projects, but they often aren’t all that interested in actually putting real money behind them.
May 2021
“For too many people, using popular search engines is a frustrating and fruitless experience,” Shir Ekerling, CEO of accessiBe, said in the press release.
“With the understanding of the web accessibility gap, the decision to put our resources into accessFind was an easy one. With accessFind, internet users
with disabilities finally have a search engine that provides them with results of readily accessible websites, working to bridge the existing digital divide.”
Another $100 says that, if they actually approached any people with disabilities to inquire about any problems we might have with using search engines, the Chief Vision Officer is the only person with a disability they asked.
I suppose it’s easy to say you’ll make the web accessible by 2025 when you can just build yourself a safe space and then pretend it’s the web. But AccessiBe’s self-constructed safe space isn’t the web any more than Facebook is.
I’ll stick with the open web, thanks.
I could be this easily bribed to slam AccessiBe because the product doesn’t solve even half the problems it claims to solve, hell will freeze over before they manage to make the entire web accessible, and Ekerling, at least, is a lying liar who lies.
There. I said it. Publicly. The AccessiBe hashtag on Twitter is overflowing with examples of websites that don’t work, complete with videos of users experiencing them not working. Ekerling knows this. So we’re well past ignorance and well into lying territory.