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After decades of halting advances, the field of Accessibility for people with disabilities has reached not a fork in one road—it’s smack in the middle of a bustling (and often contentious) convergence of many forces from many directions.
There are imperatives from legal and moral to societal and financial. Disabilities physical, sensory and cognitive. Politics and profit. Them, me. All crashing into each other in ways never seen before.
There is little consensus on where accessibility will emerge from all this. But if experts agree on anything, it’s that the business community will play a significant role. Progress will rely on good, old-fashioned entrepreneurship and investment in AI-driven communication devices, exoskeletons, consumer products and much more.
“Accessibility has been an ignored space from investment capital,” says Paul Kent, the managing partner of the Disabled Life Alliance, which connects and facilitates deals between private investors and innovators in the accessibility space. “It’s been thought of as a small market, which is ridiculous. There’s a massive return associated with this. A lot of people believe social impact requires less than market-rate returns. But that’s not true. This is not charity. It’s an investible market.”
Forbes’ inaugural Accessibility 100 list gives a unique look at the industry as it stands today, and where it’s headed. The list features the top innovators and impact-makers—from large companies to lone inventors—in sectors like mobility, communication, sports, entertainment and many more. Some make devices like “smart canes” that can tell blind users where things are, from poles to the Starbucks entrance; while others build playgrounds for disabled children, or provide access from everything to the beach, the ballot box and a career in modeling. Profiles of all 100 appear on pages devoted to those categories; for example, education is here. A full look at the methodology is here.
Featuring companies and people from 15 countries, the list was compiled through more than 400 conversations with industry insiders over nine months, and with the guidance of an expert advisory board. Disabilities considered include physical, sensory and neurodivergent; types of accessibility include digital (technology, websites and so on), physical (access to public transportation and buildings) and experiences (sports, careers and the like). Emphasis was placed on breadth of impact felt now and expected in the near future. This page details the list’s methodology and advisory board.
Current debates over DEI (often called DEIA, the A for accessibility) often overlook one dynamic: the disabled community is the one minority which anyone of any race, gender, age or financial means can suddenly find themselves thrust into. The head of accessibility at a major communications company, who asked not to be identified given the current political climate, calls accessibility a “casualty of war” over DEI policies—such as when the Trump administration stopped providing sign-language interpretation during broadcasts of press briefings, cutting them off to deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens. (The National Association of the Deaf immediately sued.) Likewise, stricter protections for disabled airline travelers instituted by the previous administraion—such as reimbursement for wheelchair damage and better training for flight personnel to increase safety—have been opposed by the airline industry, which is now seeking to delay, dilute, or remove them altogether.
As such conflicts play out, companies and entrepreneurs currently changing the world of accessibility are, in ways surprisingly new, inviting people with all disabilities into design conversations and testing labs, heeding the community’s mantra, “Nothing about us without us.” Recently, as sign-language robotic hands were hailed by outsiders as possibly replacing expensive interpreters—a certainly worthwhile goal—the enthusiasm has obscured the reality that they didn’t really serve the deaf and hard-of-hearing community yet.
“American Sign Language is 70 percent what we call nonverbal markers—it’s your face, how your body moves, not just hand shapes,” says Kelby Brick, the chief operating officer of the National Federation of the Deaf. Usable innovation in the area, he suspects, would require AI-driven avatars that can convey that nuance.
Not all advancements in accessibility are contentious. Many become universal. Closed captioning—originally designed for the deaf—has grown so ubiquitous that it has became one of many examples of what is now called “the curb-cut effect,” so named after sloped curbs designed for people with disabilities wound up benefitting everyone, like those pushing strollers or pulling suitcases. Other instances include electric toothbrushes, speech-to-text and even bendable straws.
Indeed, the preferred approach for many companies has become “universal design,” where products and services are built from the start to serve everyone, rather than winding up immediately unusable by the disabled or clumsily retrofitted after the fact. Several firms, including Accessibility 100 listmakers Deque and Fable, now produce software that checks computer code as it’s written to ensure that accessibility features work out of the box. OXO, also on the list, is a household name (literally) that designs all of its kitchen products to be easy for everyone, from smooth-turning can openers to tongs that close with one hand.
One distinct feature of accessibility innovation is that companies—even direct competitors—enthusiastically share ideas and advances, even code, to hasten innovation for all. For example, Procter & Gamble invented raised icons that blind and low-vision people can feel to distinguish products like liquid soap, shampoo and laundry detergent from each other; the company is sharing them with others to make them standard. “We’re not just trying to do it alone,” says Sam Latif, P&G’s Company Accessibility Leader. “Doing it on a few products is not as impactful as the industry doing it together.”
Apple operating systems have built accessibility features into its software since the 1980s, but when Steve Jobs insisted that the first iPhone have no buttons—making it almost unusable for blind people—it sparked faster and faster feature innovations, like haptic feedback, screen magnification, suppression of flashing content and hundreds more. There are so many, in fact, that Apple recently introduced App Store “Accessibility Nutrition Labels” to let users know how each app serves their specific disability.
“It makes good business sense to make technology that works for everyone—we mean everyone,” says Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s top accessibility official. “Accessibility is some of the most creative work we do.”
