Web Accessibility in Developing Countries

Hello everybody. We are a group of graduate students from the University of Michigan School of Information, and today we are here to talk about web accessibility in developing regions. Our team includes me, Sheza Munir, Lindsey Forche, Spandan Sharma, Anna Vento, and Maryam Namakforoosh. So story time. When I was growing up in Pakistan, I was obsessed with reading books and my parents were not too fond of screens. So my sister and I shared a phone. It was this phone. It's a Nokia 5310 and it has buttons and a very colorful but small screen. So in fourth grade, I discovered that it had internet connectivity as well. And coinciding with that discovery was the world of online novels. And if you've read online novels, you'll know how addicting they are on the speed of like 100 KB per second. I would spend hours reading books online and. Even though it was mostly like text pages, it would take several minutes to load those pages, and all of the media would show up with a broken icon at the top.

And as I grew up, this core memory just stuck with me. And when I started my computer science degree, I found out ways that we can. The ways in which we can work around these constraints. This bandwidth or lower, is still a reality in many different areas of the world, and through our talk, we hope to create an environment that supports another young girl in a far off corner of the world. Enjoy her favorite stories online. Our talk centers around the fact that web accessibility and bridging the digital divide are crucial for ensuring inclusivity. And there are two integral parts of this web accessibility. The web needs to be reachable and understandable. We will focus on both of these aspects by performance optimizations on the backend and inclusive design on the front end.

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So let us, let us talk about some as impacts of inaccessibility. So research shows that there is a direct link between digital inclusion and economic development. So just to show of hands, how many of us have used Google or YouTube to look up a tutorial? Nice. Uh, how many of us have participated in remote job opportunities? Nice. And how many of us use social media? Nice. So imagine doing all of these activities at the speed of 20mbps. This is a diagram of the world, where each of the speeds of majority of the globe vary from 20 to 80mbps. However, this is not the reality for us in the States, where our speed varies from 150 to 2 80mbps. So to visualize this, let us look at this video.

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This is the video. I can't see it. But next. So this video is running at 20mbps and it shows the change of the happy smile. Um, I want to replay it. Okay. Um. Yeah, it shows basically the change of the happy smiley to a sad smiley. I guess that's ironic. But yeah, so it's 20mbps. The same video. Okay. You can see it takes eight seconds to run. So yeah yeah yeah yeah. And now it turned sad. So now we'll run the same video at 200mbps. Maybe. Technical difficulty. Yeah. Okay, so you'll see. Happy smiley. Sad smiley. That took two seconds. The code for these, uh, both of these websites is identical. The words that you see that? Oh, still figuring it out and stuff. They would still show in this video as well if this was actually a delayed video. So, um. Yeah. So. Uh, internet, uh, bad internet speed goes beyond inconvenience. It shows that inaccessible web content hampers education, restricts job opportunities, and impedes social inclusion, this perpetuating cycles of inequality. An instance of this can be students in remote areas who are unable to access virtual libraries or participate in engaging learning platforms, which impedes their lack of knowledge and thus limits their future prospects.

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To better understand the context, we need to dive into the current challenges that are furthering the digital divide and the affected groups. We identified five challenges. The first challenge is limited infrastructure, electricity, internet, and access to hardware devices are required to actually access the internet. The infrastructure that's needed for the users to engage in the internet. And then maintenance is also important because if you're in a remote area and something breaks, someone may not be able to reach you to fix that problem, and you'll be discouraged from continuing to participate in the digital world. The next challenge is restrictive policies. One specific example is regulatory issues in this research paper. Implementing digital health in the developing world is discussed. One issue that they identified was many countries in Africa have multiple bodies or multiple groups that claim control, and if multiple groups are telling, are saying what to do, it causes confusion, delays and overlaps in regulation.

And then with an absence in of regulatory mechanisms, a companies may potentially take advantage of the users in these areas. There are other examples, such as geopolitical conflicts and with geopolitical conflicts happening around the world, it will continue to be difficult for people in these areas to have infrastructure placed, and then for them to be able to engage in the digital world. The next challenge is awareness gaps. One example is digital literacy and digital skills. This graph was done by was. It is based on a survey done by Wiley and they gathered information about this digital skill gap around the world. The digital skill gap that I'm referencing is the is the amount of digital skills present in a country. So for example, or ten represents that a country would have a lot of digital skills present on average, and zero would represent a low or not, no digital skills at all in that area. And for example, for comparison, the United States has a high level of digital skills, and many countries in Africa either have a no digital skills or low digital skills, and that may be due to not enough information or just this digital skill gap overall.

Another challenge is cost. Here are a few countries sampled to represent to compare the percentage of monthly earnings spent on one gigabyte of data, India spends about a third as much as the United States on average for one gigabyte of data, and Botswana spends about three times as much as the United States. Next, here are the speeds for the same countries. India has about 0.4 times the speed as the United States, and Botswana has about 0.1 times the speed as the United States. But what do these actually mean? India has had a large focus on technology and developing their infrastructure to allow their users to participate in the digital world, whereas Botswana is still developing their infrastructure and trying to engage in the digital world. While both of these countries are are developing countries, they are in different places. The cost and these costs are reflected reflective of that. The difference may be a burden for countries that are early on in development of their infrastructure, causing a barrier and furthering the digital divide.

The last challenge that we identified is a language barriers. This is an example. This is a Python documentation of sorting. On the left is the English translation and on the right is a Korean translation. Interesting. Well, one of the issues with this translation was that there were only nine languages available, which there aren't only nine languages in the world. So that is the first barrier of entry for users that may want to use this documentation. And then as you can see in the lower box, there are some English sprinkled throughout the Korean translation. And then the other box. This is a one sentence that's translated to Korean, but it is not translated in a way that would be the natural translation for someone who speaks Korean. So if there was a better way of translating and potentially using localization to improve this, then it would be a smoother and overall better experience for those who read this in their native language. All of these challenges are affecting various groups.

Mainly, we're focusing on people in developing countries in this presentation, but there are a wide array of people affected by these challenges. These groups should not be disregarded when you're developing. You should consider them as you're developing so that you can improve the experience for everyone and close the digital divide. Not all of these challenges fall on developers. To fix some of them, we can optimize and help support anyone who's affected. For example, for limited infrastructure is going to go into performance optimization that developers can do to help with this divide. Anna later is going to discuss inclusive design principles that help with awareness gaps. And then also there are a few Drupal modules that help with language barriers, such as the localization API and content translation module for the localization API. I did notice that it was in Drupal seven, and so it may not be updated into the newer versions of Drupal. However, there's also content translation modules which would help for the actual content translation, which would be a good thing to utilize in your development.

So having all of these tools and potentially more tools moving forward, if one is deprecated, will be a great opportunity to help the affected groups. So given these challenges and the impact of this digital divide, the onus falls on us as developers to create solutions that can run on low resources. And in this section, I will talk about what developers can do on the back end to make the web more accessible. So we know that the web runs on HTTP requests. The higher the number of requests, the longer it will take to load it on the client's end. We can see that lower bandwidth take much longer to run to load the same amount of data. And so at a key performance optimization here is to minimize the number of HTTP requests that our website needs. Over here we have a graph evaluating a generic website. We have the number of concurrent requests on the x axis and the response time in milliseconds on the y axis. So we can see over here that as the number of concurrent requests increases, the response time increases, and the rate of failures also goes up.

And this can be a challenge in accessing websites in regions with limited resources. So what can we do about it? Well, we've got some practical solutions over here. First off, we start by removing any unnecessary plugins that add requests that can slow down the website. The second approach is to focus on using plugins that need low resources. For example, a simple social sharing button instead of plugins that would need a lot of resources to run, for example, for animations. We can also be smart about loading scripts, such as bundling multiple multiple scripts into a single file and using asynchronous loading when appropriate. Next, let's talk about how we can make our websites faster by optimizing and compressing images and videos. When it comes to website speed, images and videos can have a significant impact. As we can see in this visualization as well, large image files can create bottlenecks and lead to longer load times. But thankfully, there are ways in which we can reduce their load again.

First off, we would start by removing any images or videos that we don't really need on the website. This reduces the number of HTTP requests the website has to use, and would make it faster for people with slow internet for the. Sorry for the images and videos we do keep. We can make them smaller without having them look bad. From this plot. Over here we can see that at higher file sizes, a large drop in size does not correspond with a large drop in quality, which means that we can decrease sizes while still having clear media. Another trick is to use lazy loading, which means that images and videos only only load when someone scrolls to them, saving time and data. Here are some tools that can help optimize images and media. They also have APIs that we can plug in our code while creating those websites. All right, now that we have optimized our media for faster loading, let's talk about another powerful technique to to speed up our websites caching. Here we can see that in loading a website from a server, there are multiple steps, and each of these steps offer the opportunity for caching.

Browser caching includes having cookies or saving website resources right on your website, right on your visitors devices. When they come back to your site, their browsers can just grab those stored resources instead of fetching them again from the server. Page caching would pay would cache the whole web page in one go. Similarly, database caching keeps frequently accessed data readily available and reduces the need for repeated database queries. So this lower server stress creates a smoother browsing experience and reduces load on our servers. Happy news for us is that Drupal has great support for caching this cache. API supports optimizing speeds, especially for JavaScript websites. Next up we have content delivery networks. CDNs are like highways for data, and the key idea is that you have web content scattered on servers all across the world. So when someone in, say, Africa or South Asia needs to access a website that's hosted in the US instead of traveling thousands of miles, the content gets delivered from a server that's much closer to them.

And CDNs can help reduce bandwidth costs for providers and make it more, more affordable to serve users in these regions. And they also enhance reliability, which is a huge, uh, which is a huge point for these areas by distributing content across multiple servers and reduces the risk of downtime due to local outages. So this is the usual flow of how a CDN would work. The request goes out to the global CDN. If a cache is found, the response is sent right away, and if it's not found, the whole cycle to the application container and back is completed. And we recently learned that University of Michigan has saved a lot of a lot of money using the Pantheon Global Stadium, which which basically runs on this platform. Great news for us. Again, Drupal offers CDN support as well. This module changes URL, uh, file URL so they're downloaded from a CDN instead of your web server. It supports CDN mapping, pre connecting and automatic auto balancing files over multiple CDNs. And here are some other tools that can help with CDN support.

So we've seen that in a lot of these developing regions, smartphone usage is much higher than regular personal computers. That is great because it opens up room for progressive web apps. PWAs are a game changer for web accessibility, especially in developing regions where internet access can be challenging. PWAs offer an app like experience through a web browser. They are lightweight, fast and can even work in offline modes, which makes them great for audiences with limited resources. Businesses can leverage PWAs to bridge the accessibility gap and reach users in underserved areas. Take, for example, Facebook Lite and AliExpress and all of these other apps. They expanded their reach to users in developing regions and witnessed a lot of growth by offering fast, responsive, and offline capable experience. PWAs empower users to and contribute to digital inclusion. Even more good news for us. Drupal also offers PWA support. The main benefit of this module is that it offers a background skip script for caching and offline capabilities.

So when it comes to making sure that our service is accessible to users in developing regions, one key aspect that we need to focus on is testing performance regularly. Factors like hosting speeds, the number of JavaScript elements, and overall responsiveness all affect how our service performs. So what can a developer do about this? With regular tests, we we can keep track of resources used by our sites. This includes monitoring things like image sizes, video content, and third party scripts. As you can see here in this example as well. This is an example from a testing tool we can keep track of load time, the web page size, the number of requests your website is getting, and even the location and devices your users are using. By optimizing these resources, we can further improve our site's performance and ensure that it remains reachable by all users. Again, here are some examples of testing tools that we can use to do so, and they can help us monitor loading speeds, identify bottlenecks, and check accessibility errors.

Educating and connecting with users in low resource areas is crucial for bridging the digital divide. One key aspect we need to consider is that these users have a very different internet usage pattern. Cultural norms and resource constraints significantly influence how technology is used and perceived. So when we talk about reaching these low resource areas, it's not just about bringing the current internet to them or preparing them for it, but also curating products according to their specific needs and cultural sensitivities. This could involve simplifying the authentication processes, providing localized content, and offering education on safe internet practices. I remember a study where my friend researched the use of texting via WhatsApp in a village, and something, something she learned in the process was that people had a very different understanding of passwords, where they thought that it was to hide information rather than giving a layer of security. So for these users, we would want to figure out an alternate way of authentication that fits in with their mental models.

Another example that comes to mind is that in a lot of developing countries, people share their phones with family members and people in the community. So the one person, one account model that we usually have does not really fit in well with that. Designing around this shared access can help reach many more people. So overall, these performance optimizations show that by making such few changes on the back end, we can make our websites much more reachable.

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All right. So that was a great overview on what we can do on the back end to increase accessibility by optimizing performance. In this next section I'll be going over now what we can do in the front end. And I'll be through using inclusive design principles. So start off I want to bring your attention to this statistic. Over 15% of people in the world live with a disability that is over 1 billion people. Of this, 1,000,000,080% live in low and middle income countries. When I first read this statistic, I was astonished. This is so many people. You may be asking yourself, what is this number? Or should I say, what do these people have to do with web development? Well, when I worked in the industry, both as a software engineer and now as a technical product manager, a common question was how our user or how their audience interact with feature or product X, Y, or Z. And while I understand it's important to think about the majority, I challenge you today not to underestimate the minority because these 1 billion people across the globe who again, mostly come from economically disadvantaged countries, also deserve the ability to navigate government websites, medical websites and any websites we may create.

So other ways we can share this? Well, luckily for us, there are people and organizations who have been researching for years the best ways that we can make our websites more accessible. Most popular being the World Wide Web Consortium at the W3C. They have composed a list of guidelines called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or wcaG, with the goal of providing a standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. They base these guidelines across four main principles. The first one is perceivable. This means that users can identify content through means of the senses. For most users, this is going to be perceiving a system primarily visually, but for others this could be through sound or touch. Next, we have operable. This means that users can successfully use buttons, controls, navigation, and other interactive elements. For most users, this is going to be through mouse and keyboard, but for others this could be through using assistive technologies such as screen readers or voice recognition.

And next, we have understandable users should be able to comprehend your content and learn how to remember your site. Your website should therefore be consistent in its presentation and format, predictable its design and usage patterns, and appropriate to the audience its tone and voice. And finally, we have robust content must be robust enough that it could be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of users, including those who use assistive technologies, especially as these technologies advance. To emphasize the importance of these principles, I want to show you how screen readers interact with websites. Here you can see an example of what a screen reader would say to someone who, let's say, had vision loss. Navigation. Navigation, heading, level one, header, heading, level one, home link, and so on. Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who needed to rely on this type of environment to interact with websites. They have to remember the content and format of your website as it's being read out to them.

As I read as I watched interviews of screen readers discussing this process, they mentioned that this could be mentally exhausting. So if you. So if your websites don't follow a consistent pattern, or you get lazy and put every tag inside of a div instead of its proper semantic element, you're just adding to the mental load that these users have to carry as they mentally try a puzzle your site together. I hope you can see the importance of these principles, and even though they seem as straightforward to implement, there is a study in 2021 that investigated the home pages for the top 1 million websites. The results 50 over 51 million distinct accessibility errors were detected. You know, if I try to push code or hand in a school project with 51 errors per page on it, my colleagues and professor would probably recommend I pursue a different profession. So we can't just be complacent with the current state of website accessibility. And then this next part of the presentation, I want to walk you through what some of these guidelines look like.

I encourage you to think if your own websites build in these functionalities. The first one we have is keyboard accessibility. This stems from the fact that many individuals, especially in developing regions, face challenges such as limited access to advanced technologies or physical challenges such as motor disabilities. Therefore, they rely on keyboard alone for website navigation. As developers, it's important that we make sure all links and controls can be accessed using the tab key on your keyboard, so that these users can still get the crucial information, fun, entertainment, or anything in between that your website may offer. Next we have alt text. This is a descriptive text displayed if an image file cannot load or is disabled. Alt text enables screen readers to read information about on screen images. This is imperative for people who have visual impairments or in areas where image loading may be slow or unreliable. And finally, we have color contrast. This is a high impact on those with low vision and with color blindness.

Like many of these, this can affect anyone as anyone can miss important information due to insufficient color contrast. Some ways to combat this include utilizing color contrast tools to verify your pages contrast, and not relying on color alone to convey information. Instead, consider using additional visual cues such as bolding or underlining in tandem with color in order to emphasize key points to all readers. Again, these are just a few of the many ways you can increase the accessibility of your web page designs. I understand that reading through these guidelines, and mainly ensuring that your websites conform to them, may seem like a daunting task. So I want to bring your attention to the plethora of accessibility tools out there that you can use to test your websites. As you can see, many of these will detect errors and give warnings if accessibility standards are not met. While no one tool can detect all accessibility errors, these at least can give you a great start and foundation.

And with that said before. And that said before I turn it over to the next section, I do want to encourage you again to take a look at the wcaG and keep them in mind as you design your websites, as they provide a comprehensive framework for ensuring the inclusivity and accessibility for all users. By incorporating these guidelines into your design process from the outset, you not only enhance the user experience for those with disabilities, but also create a more user friendly and welcoming environment for everyone. Remember, accessibility should not just be a second thought or legal necessity. Rather, it's a moral imperative and a fundamental aspect. Of good design. So if you don't have a good moral compass or if that's not enough for you, let's talk about profit and accessibility. So Forrester Report and, uh, Richard Pearson. Uh, Roger. Roger Pressman, uh, have, uh, said that every $1 spent on user experience of your software returns $100 in revenue for a successful business. Designing for everybody is key.

The sum of the business benefits include improved conversion rates, better marketing efforts, and decreased operating expenses. Let us talk a little bit in detail about all three of these. So for improved conversion rate, uh, for people who are familiar with user experience, uh, they might already know this effect. But there is the aesthetic usability effect that states that a user is going to consider a software or a website or a product to be more usable if it is aesthetically pleasing. So if you have an ugly website, uh, users are likely to, uh, not to come back or return to your website. So, uh, having a good user experience and aesthetically pleasing website retains old customers as well as creates a better impression on the new ones. Inaccessible websites miss out on 15 to 20% of potential clients. This is equal to $6.9 billion a year that those websites lose to their counterparts. Another way, another benefit is successful marketing efforts. So I know I talked about search engine optimization.

It shows that slow or inaccessible sites are bound to be sure lower ranked in in the search results. So making conscious decisions in the development and production process is very important. A success story of this is TikTok. Uh, they they they saw their audience members who were diagnosed with ADHD, auditory, uh, auditory processing disorder or autism, and they relied a lot on closed captions to process the videos. So rather than initially, TikTok had the impression that okay user, the creators could turn on closed captions or edit them. But after observing the success model, they instead made it a default option to have closed captions on all of their recordings. So now users, rather than having to go the extra step to put the closed captions, the closed captions are a default option, which can be now edited by creators or turned off. So another one is decreased operating costs. So a more user, uh, more user friendly website means that users are easily more are more easily able to access and navigate, uh, your website.

Another um, which leads to, uh, less dedicated customer staff, a better, uh, uh benefit is the reduced likelihood of lawsuits. So an example of this is the Dominos lawsuit. Who was sued, uh, who were sued by a blind or visually impaired person who could not access their website anytime they wanted to order pizza. Uh, after winning this. This was a huge win for Ada, but a very sour loss for Domino's, who had to pay $4,000 for each time the person visited their website. That's a lot of money. So, um, you're asking, where do we fit in? We are developers. We are business people. Yes, we all fit in together. So the developers are aware of the industry guidelines and how to make your website or your apps more accessible to people have lower, uh, higher performance, lower, uh, lower loading speed, which is, which was talked by Anna and Shiza in the previous sections. The where the business people fit in is that we can hire more project managers, more UX people, or, uh, people who are aware of the accessibility standards in the industry and uh, actually, uh, give them the support they need to actually make all of our products better.

Uh, another one that can be a small scale, uh, effect we can do is a lot of us may use, uh, Jira and have, like, tickets over there. So one of the acceptance criteria for each of the tickets, wherever it's valid, could be that, okay, whenever we have finished this issue or this, uh, feature, it is accessible to the targeted audience. So we should try to focus our, uh, attention to people with disabilities and not the other way around where we are, uh, creating products for an ideal user. And, uh, we are just, uh, thinking of people with disabilities as edge cases. Okay. So we've talked about. The importance.

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Of accessibility. We've talked about some of the challenges we face, some things that can be doing on the back end and front end and some of the business advantages. Now, I wanted to go into some global initiatives that have been happening around the world and what we can learn from them. So how many of you have heard of one laptop per child? Okay, so a lot of you. So One Laptop Per child or Olpc for short, was a ginormous initiative of educational reform that was pretty much unmatched until that point of time, which was about the year 2005. And what Olpc set out to do was to build and sell these low cost, low electricity connected laptops initially promised to come out at about $100 per laptop that could be operated without or with little language literacy. And basically the overall goal here was that each child would have their own laptop and they would have access to the internet and this, um, this repository of information, and they would learn from that. They would spread that to their families, they would share it with their families, yadda yadda.

And basically the entire world would now be educated. And at its time, it created quite a bit of controversy. Some were sure that it would change the world, others were a bit more skeptical. But overall the mission sounds great, right? Um, but sadly, Olpc is actually considered to have failed and failed pretty drastically given what it was set out to do. Um, and there are many reasons as to why it failed, but the most interesting and applicable to our presentation is the founder wanted to, uh, to deploy the project as soon as possible and thought that simply distributing these devices would pretty much solve the problem. Um, not taking into account social context, cultural differences, issues of geopolitics. Um, and to quote the there was a lack of consideration for adoption to the local cultures and societies. So pretty much all these very crucial aspects that we should be taking into account when we are trying to design and build for these populations and include them in our technological, technological innovations.

So there are a lot of reasons why it failed. Again, some listed here, and I think it's really interesting to go look into. But the point we want to be making is that, yes, it's incredibly important to bridge the digital divide and be inclusive, but it's also it's also very important that we understand these populations when we're trying to go about this. Um, so second. Sorry. Okay. Uh, another thing we wanted to mention, another example that we thought would be noteworthy is Facebook in Africa. So about ten years ago, Zuckerberg announced that he wanted every person. Yes, I know he wanted every person in the world, uh, to have affordable access to the internet. And so he introduced this thing called Internet.org, or it's Free Basics bundle, as his way of bringing this vision to life. And basically what Free Basics does is that it's a mobile app working with local telecom operators to give users access to a data like snippet of the internet. Um, that would be data free for the users. So sticking to the inclusive principles that we mentioned, uh, sounds pretty neat.

Again, people couldn't afford access to the internet, can now afford access to the internet. Yay! But not really. There's another side to this coin. So in the name of philanthropy, Zuckerberg or Meta has attempted to corner the market in this region. And what they're doing is they're kind of creating a two tier internet of rich and poor that goes against the concept of net neutrality. And because of this, it's actually banned in India. Um, so content provided through free basics. Um, it has to basically be content that is approved by meta, and I quote, would force other businesses to set up shop on Facebook rather than on their own websites and elsewhere on the internet. So not only is it making the internet known through Facebook, it's also basically having them believe that the internet is synonymous to Facebook and coding. Larry Biddle from Global Voices Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things. It's building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer.

Um, now the service is available in many countries, but it's been dominant, especially in Africa. And, uh, while there are many issues that can be discussed here, such as issues of privacy, data collection and monetization, the purpose of our talk here is to twofold. Firstly, noting that exploitation is happening here. And again, when we're designing for these, uh, populations, it's important that we be mindful, um, and how we are attempting to bridge the digital divide. But secondly, to bring your attention to the fact that so much attention is being placed on these developing regions and the next billion, billion users and asking ourselves, why? Uh, so why has Facebook or Meta placed so much attention on the global South and Africa especially? The reason for that is that the market there is huge, uh, it's basically a creative economic strategy. Uh, Africa has seen huge growth in mobile phone penetration and mobile broadband internet and consequently infrastructure development, um, throughout the past years.

And while there's still a large portion of the population that is not connected to the internet, internet access has increased 10,402% in Africa alone from the year 2000 to 2019, and that number is cut off five years back. So that number is increased quite a bit. So while there's reluctance to invest in these regions and the reluctance is understandable, um, this hesitation is based on an outdated view of the developing world. Um, there are already many multinational companies doing businesses in these regions, um, doing business in these regions. And while the barriers are there, they're actually quite, uh, much easier to get through than we, I think initially think. So. Um, so what we're seeing in this image is the world economic pyramid. And most companies target the top tier. So the high income population overlooking the bottom of the population that make for the majority of people in the world. Uh, so the, the bottom of the pyramid can serve, uh, sorry, it can serve as new sources for growth for companies.

And because they're in the early stages, stages of development, this growth can be fast and we can see high profits. So I'll spend and mentioned the business benefits of being accessible. There is also a lot of profit to be made in our attempt to be inclusive. And lastly I wanted to talk to end my spiel on all of this. I wanted to take a few moments to talk about some research done at the University of Michigan on Geoblocking. So simply speaking, Geoblocking is the act of restricting users access to content and services based on their physical location. So by definition, it's already a pretty non-inclusive and unfair act. Um, now the common perception is that geoblocking is due to political restrictions and government requests and will that holds true in some cases cases. It's not necessarily true. So the research done here, um, collected data from 5684 globally popular apps. And they defined globally popular by applications that had over a million downloads. And they gathered applications from 22 categories such as social apps, medical, educational and news apps.

Um, and and they gathered these from 26 countries from Google Play. And overall they collected over 100,000 APK files and privacy policies. And the results showed that at least 3672 applications out of those 5684, so about 64% were being blocked in at least one country. Um, and when further research was done, they discovered that, as mentioned before, this blocking was done significantly and mostly by developers. Um, so developers were isolating entire countries and restricting access for users. They also found that there were different versions of these applications being released that, I quote, had weaker security settings or privacy disclosures that exposed users to higher security and privacy risks. And so what I want to be pointing out is by referencing this research, is that it's important for us to be mindful of such issues and the part we play as developers in creating these applications and websites. And it's important to try to avoid building localized versions that are restrictive and invasive.

But we understand that that might not sometimes be possible due to issues of legal compliance. And that is the case. I think it's important that we be transparent. Uh, we be transparent with users and specify the regional differences. So to conclude, we've talked about current challenges, accessibility issues and the importance of contextual research and our effort to be digitally exclusive. Um, and what we have done here is that, well, we've talked about it quite a bit throughout our presentation. We wanted to wrap up and make this more digestible. So we've divided it into four main categories of education and collaboration enhanced user experience, accessibility, inclusivity and performance optimization, and some of the things we can be doing. Um, ultimately, we want to conclude that web accessibility is not only a moral imperative, but also a catalyst for global advancement. And as the world increasingly relies on digital platforms, we must recognize the critical need for accessibility.

We all need to collaborate and prioritize inclusivity. And by helping bridge the digital divide, we empower individuals, foster innovation, and drive economic growth. This ensures that we can progress collectively, forging a path toward a more inclusive and equitable digital future, leaving no one behind in our journey of advancement. So let us all commit to building a more inclusive and accessible digital world. And as we leave you all today, we hope that we've provided some guidance on how we can do that, and we hope that you spread the message of its importance. Thank you all for your time. And are there any questions that we can answer for you? Oh, we have a question. Yes. We have three questions. Okay, okay. Go ahead. What is your understanding. Of why geo blocking occurs? Is it from developers? Is it, um, just, uh.

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Laziness on the part. Of not wanting to try to enhance performance for lower infrastructure countries or something else? I think it depends on the business. Sorry. What's that? Repeat the question for the recording. Okay. Uh, what is our understanding of why geo blocking occurs on developers end? Uh, the developers end. And I think, I think it would depend on the business, like there are many reasons this could happen. I think, yes, one could be that they just don't want to take it into account. I think the other would be like the business decides that they don't want to include those regions. So like an example for that would be I'm from Iran, um, and there might not be a profit there. So one of the applications that you can't access in Iran is LinkedIn. Actually. Um, yes. You can't download it off of Google Play. Uh, and again, like on that is something that's happening on the developers end. And I think it's just because there's not enough profit to be made there. Um, and so they're just not including them.

Yeah. I also want to add that, um, with these places, a language barrier is also play a role in that when developers find out that it's not, um, going to translate over well, and their tools show that the language, if there's no language accessibility, they might just not introduce those apps in those regions to save their, uh, ratings and stuff like that. So I think there's like a common really it would depend on that business, but a combination of reasons, really. And does it answer your question? It did. Perfect.

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Um, yes. You mentioned that roughly 80% of the 1 billion who are disabled are in low and middle income countries. Uh, but they seem to also be the most likely to be using mobile devices rather than desktop. So what, uh, tools what software are they using to make their phones more accessible? I can I can answer some part of that. So, um, something that I've seen. Oh, yeah, I can repeat the question. So we know that most of the disabled population is in the lower and middle income countries, and they and most of these places have a higher penetration of smartphones rather than regular computers. So how do they work around that? So one point is that the PWAs that I mentioned, a lot of the a lot of the applications over there are hosted through the web browser. So the web accessibility that's done for the regular computers does apply sort of over there. But then again, I do remember that my grandmother just remembered all the steps she had to do to do something like she would go by color instead of the text.

So that is another aspect that's very really use that. In these, uh, places, focus is on creating icons rather than using text text. So that's where the accessibility part comes in as well. And I think you want to add something to that. Oh okay. I thought you were. Yeah. Yeah. So does that answer your question. Uh. What would we do in cases then in those countries where they're blind or visually impaired and they wouldn't be able to use icons? That's a good question. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Screen readers do exist over there. It's just that, um, with phone with phone access, they're using them through the web browsers rather than the applications. Okay. So they're using screen readers through the web applications on their phone. Yes. And I believe we. Uh, I also believe that, um, smartphones also have built in screen readers and Assistive Touch, uh, where they do take, uh, voice commands or voice input or like, read out, like even if you have a mobile app, uh, it will still, uh, help you navigate the app through voice, um.

Response. Yes, definitely. I, I had a friend back home who uses Facebook just with she uses the Facebook app, but she uses it just with voice commands because and it does offer that support for visually impaired people. Okay. Thank you. And again lastly I'd like to touch on once again you're on. I think there are also local versions of screen readers and all of that. But I think like what we're pointing out would be that, again, they're not as advanced that they should be. And there's a lot that we can be doing on this end, being as advanced as we are to include those populations, um, even in that technology. Yes. Thank you. So for the infrastructure piece and how to deal with low transfer speeds and unreliable connections, um, the good news is that the internet was built to accommodate those problems. And those of us who remember the sound of a phone modem connecting at 1000kbps, um, the the the infrastructure is there, the design is there, and we just have to avoid being lazy and assuming that everyone has the 200mbps that we currently enjoy.

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That's a very important point to make. Yes.

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Yes. Uh, are there any tools that a website developer here in Chicago could use to simulate the experience of accessing the website. From India or Botswana or some other part of the world? You can. Say, well, I'm not actually sure, but I would say like when it comes to issues, if you want to go ahead like. No, no, if you have something you confidently. Can say, yeah, I can't say it confidently, but I was going to. Sorry. Go ahead. I can answer that question. You can use Charles proxy. That's a proxy tool, and you can use it to throttle your network requests. And Google Chrome also has a built in network throttling where you can emulate all the way down to one G. Yeah. I was also going to give the example of inspect element on Google Chrome, where you can use throttling to slow it down. Um, but my advice was just going to be to look it up and see like, uh, yeah, network simulations, uh, simulations where, yeah, you can, um, just input the speed, the internet speed. And it would try to replicate that speed, uh, to load the website or mobile app or.

Yeah. But I have personally like used inspect element, just like for my what purposes? Um, and that seemed to do the job of like, throttling and figuring out the speed. Thank you. Thanks. Do we have any other questions? Yes, yes. Oh, uh, what percentage of the developing world that you're talking about does not use a Latin script? I don't have the numbers for that. We don't have the exact numbers for that. But we do have information on, uh, language differences. And did you want to.

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Oh, oh, we had the. We had the graph with like. Yeah, the language. We had a graph in our other slide deck. I don't think it's going to and if I remember correctly, I feel like I only remember the English because that was the point I was going to make that like I think it was about like 60% speak it and write English around the world. But the percentages, like for the rest of the percentages, it probably ranged from 0 to 15% for the other languages they represent. But I don't actually have the recall for that and or the numbers, I am sorry. Uh, we do have the graph, so maybe after the thing we could, like, give it to you. But yeah, from what I remember, it was in our old slides. These are our polished slides. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think, uh, there was, uh, it's like the most often, uh, most popular spoken languages and the languages that are actually offered in development. And I think English was the only commonality between the two. Yeah. Do we have any other questions? All right. Thank you guys.

You have been a wonderful.