This Disability History Month we have a guest blog from Dr Josh Lim, the University of Bath institutional Digital Accessibility Leader.
Accessibility is about making spaces – physical or digital – that everyone can use. Just as stairs without ramps block physical access, the digital world has its own barriers too: images without alt text, videos without captions, or websites that are confusing to use. During Disability History Month, it’s a good time to reflect on how digital accessibility has changed and how inclusive design can benefit everyone.
Early innovations to support access
Technology and accessibility have always been linked. Many tools we now see as everyday conveniences have links to assistive technologies:
- Typewriters, like the one designed by Pellegrino Turri around 1800, helped his blind friend to write legibly. Typing on a keyboard remains the most common writing tool today for most.
- Talking books (early audiobooks) introduced by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) in 1935 gave war blinded-soldiers access to books. The global audiobook market is growing and in 2024 was around $9 billion.
- Closed captions were available for pre-recorded programs on the BBC through Teletext in 1979, so could enjoy TV if you were hearing impaired. An estimated 80% of Gen Z now uses subtitles most of the time.
- Screen readers pioneered by IBM in 1986 helped blind users navigate DOS systems. Text-to-speech also underpins technologies like modern voice assistants (for example Siri and Alexa).
As these innovations moved from niche to mainstream, they’re often no longer seen through the lens of accessibility or disability, proving that everyone can benefit from good accessibility.
The World Wide Web and digital accessibility
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, highlighted the importance of disability and accessibility back in 1994. He later founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in 1999. These best practice guidelines also warned against some of the worst design elements of the early web (flashing text, poor colour contrast and automatically scrolling marquee text), which were irritating for most users, and debilitating for some.
Alt-text, introduced in 1993, is a short image description of an image’s contents. It was introduced to help blind people understand the visual content and also give a text alternative for slow/failed loading images on the early internet. Despite the importance of alt-text, it has a long history of misuse.
It was common in the 1990’s and early 2000’s to “stuff” keywords in alt-text to get more traffic from early search engines. Google and modern search engines now penalise this use and try to favour sites with better accessibility.
More recently, when Twitter made alt-text visible to all users, some businesses deliberately misused alt-text for promotional jokes until public outcry changed their behaviours.
Accessibility Starts with Authoring
Technology, standards guidelines matter, but they only work when paired with good accessibility practices. You don’t need to be an expert in disability or technology to make things digitally accessible but follow a set of design habits and practices. Some of these practices are common, like writing using clear, concise language. Some more examples that can have a big impact for disabilities.
- Use descriptive links (e.g. “Read more about accessibility” rather generic “click here” link text or long URLs). Scanning around for the context of “click here” can be difficult for some and long links are difficult to understand.
- Structure and formatting. Properly formatted headings, bullet points and tables can help people process information easily and give navigation landmarks for people using assistive technology.
- Captions and transcripts for audio and video. This supports people who are deaf, ADHD, English as foreign language, or benefit from processing text and are widely used by many.
- Good alt text for images. This gives a blind user a way to engage with an image content.
Authoring tools in Microsoft Office and Moodle have accessibility checkers to help fix issues, but these are only effective when used intentionally. The best approach is to build accessibility into your workflow, not as an afterthought.
To learn how to create content everyone can access, there is also support at the University of Bath:
- Digital accessibility guidance for best practice
- Digital Accessibility for Learning and Teaching
- Digital Accessibility Community on Microsoft Teams also run a drop-in support session every two weeks.
What’s next for digital accessibility
The European Accessibility Act (2025) sets accessibility standards for businesses in the EU: the UK may benefit indirectly as software vendors and other platforms engage more with digital accessibility.
Closer to home, the University’s efforts in digital accessibility are focused on creating a more inclusive digital experience for staff and students - and empowering those who design and share digital content to make it accessible.
Emerging tech like AI-driven personalisation and real-time transcription offer promise, but they must be developed ethically and inclusively to avoid reinforcing bias or creating new barriers (see The State of Digital Accessibility – Communications of the ACM). Technology alone won’t “solve” accessibility on its own - it’s also about embedding inclusive design into everything we create.
As we mark Disability History Month, let’s commit to inclusive authoring and design. Accessibility isn’t a feature to add later. It’s a responsibility, and a way to build a world that works for everyone, and eventually leads to embed inclusion where accessibility is no longer an exception but the norm.
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