TravelAbility Insider

The Intersection of Travel and Disability

Mobility

Is This Approach to Creating an Accessible Website Too Affordable to Be True?

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2 young men with brown hair and Jake wearing a striped shirt standing in front of a board that says "impossible....illegible"
At accessiBe’s Tel Aviv office with Co-founders, (left) Gaz Vizel, CMO, Shir Ekerling, CEO, and TravelAbility’s Founder Jake Steinman.

Last July we decided to make TravelAbilitySummit.com accessible and the proposals we received– ranging from $2400-$18,000 per year with installation times estimated at 8-12 weeks–were discouraging, to say the least.  Then we found accessiBe.com, a Tel Aviv based software developer that used A.I. tools to automate websites into compliance. The cost: $495/year for websites under 1000 pages and $1495 for websites over 1000 pages. Thinking it was too good to be true, we decided to take them on their 7-day free trial. Once the line of code they sent us was loaded on our website the site began to become compliant within 10 minutes. Within 48 hours our entire website had been compliant to two different standards.  While vacationing in Israel I dropped by to quiz the founders as I felt they presented an affordable solution to many of the small DMO’s as well as boutique hotels, restaurants, campgrounds and tour providers who are vulnerable to predatory website compliance lawsuits but find the pricing so unreasonable they’re willing to roll the dice that they won’t get caught. 

Below you’ll find the interview, straight from Tel Aviv:

  1. What need does accessiBe serve?
    accessiBe solves the universal business problem of web accessibility.  Every business website in the United States must be accessible and the vast majority are not. This is largely due to complexity and cost, both of which factors accessiBe entirely ameliorates.  Our tool is completely automated and affordable for any business. Thousands of businesses are sued by individuals unable to equally access their sites every week, so there are two equally important needs we have made it our mission to solve:  business compliance needs and the physical needs of 26% of American adults living with a disability.

2. What is the accessibe origin story?
Our founders have a background in software development and also owned software development and digital marketing agencies. Our founders realized in 2016 the only solution that could achieve widespread adoption was an AI-powered and automated one, which they proceeded to create using members of the disabled community as testers to ensure it help the people it was intended to aid.       

3. How does your software work? 
Our tool uses Machine Learning, Contextual Understanding, OCR and IRIS technologies, among others, to achieve full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)  It is entirely session-based, so while it doesn’t permanently change a site’s source code, it can be individually tailored to each user’s session without affecting any other session. 

4. Which physical disabilities does the software support? 
The software enables people with all disabilities to use the internet, providing support for those with visual, motor, cognitive and other impairments.  Users can change the appearance and function of websites using the accessiBe interface both on the front end (changing fonts, colors, and contrasts) and the back end (adding alt texts for Screen Readers and enabling keyboard navigation).

5. How many clients are using the system? How many are travel related?
Currently,  accessiBe administers more than 500 travel-related websites.  accessiBe is used by more than 18,000 websites, from small businesses to large enterprises like Avon, PlayMobil, Volvo and Lonely Planet.

6.. Will Accessibe’s system avoid predatory digital crawlers trolling for non-compliant websites to threaten?
Our tool is capable of entirely remediating a site and bringing it into compliance with European and U.S.  standards within 48 hours. Therefore, if a predatory entity uses a  session-based crawler like WAVE or Lighthouse, which are the most common tools used to check sites before sending a demand letter, accessiBe would likely deter that threat. In cases where an unfamiliar application is used to scan for accessibility, there may be different results, for which we have solutions prepared.

7. What support do you offer in the event of litigation?
As of yet, not a single customer of ours has ever received a lawsuit under our watch. Many arrived at our doorstep with papers already served and when given time to fix the failures, as is legally required in many states, our solution either significantly reduced their settlement fees or enabled them to remove the threat entirely. 

We asked four people with different disabilities to test our website and grade it on an A-F scale for accessibility. The results: A, A, A-, B+. 

TravelAbility Summit Hasn’t Even Started Yet—and Already Our Speakers Our Making Big News

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l to r headshots of Josh Loebner, Ann Madison John Morris and Will Butler, all experts appearing at the TravelAbility Summit (tTravelAbilitySummit.com)

Accessibility (on and off-line) means creating experiences all travelers can enjoy. These four speakers will be at TravelAbility Summit (live from San Francisco in a matter of days!) have recently published pieces of interest: 

Advertising and Disability by Josh Loebner, contributor to Adweek 
READ MORE

Blind people can show each other something by Will Butler on LinkedIn READ MORE

The Top 10 Signs Accessibility is Going Mainstream by John Morris on WheelchairTravel.org READ MORE

What Can the Supreme Court Teach the Travel Industry? by Anne Madison, Travel Vertical Blog  READ MORE  

Learn more about TravelAbility Summit November 12-13 in San Francisco, HERE.

Pssst. Here’s What No One With A Disability May Have Told You (but they wrote it down here)

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young woman in wheelchair v fashionably dressed with leopard jacket outdoor shot
How I Arrived in New York Without My Legs

OUR TAKE: We can never get enough of real stories about real people with lived experience—whether they’re testing a new itinerary, telling the tale of how their wheelchair was lost on a plane trip or explaining how the chairs in a restaurant can keep someone in a wheelchair from enjoying the place. Two of our favorites: Why Are Airline Bathrooms So Crappy? and How I Arrived In New York Without My Legs. These real voices give you a hint of how our work—at the intersection of disability and travel—has the possibility to be incredibly impactful thanks to you.

Busting Records & Myths: One Rider Spends 1,000 Days Straight on Rails to Trails

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Four riders including Ian Mackay with a backdrop of mountains snow and green grasss
Four riders, including Mackay, tackling the mountains on a gorgeous days out. photo courtesy: Rails to Trails.

It takes a certain kind of dedication to get out on a trail every day. As in, every day. Seven days a week. Rain or shine. Scorching days, freezing days and every kind of day in between. The last day I missed was Halloween 2016, Ian Mackay told Rails to Trails. He surpassed consecutive day number 1,000 in July. In this piece, writer and rider Scott Stark, who also enjoys exploring trails across the country, describes how a serious bike injury changed Mackay’s approach to enjoying time spent trail’riding’.

OUR TAKE:  There is a way for everyone to enjoy the outdoors—and thankfully, some people are driven enough to find that path and share it with the entire state. At the TravelAbility Summit on November 11-13, the focus will always be on ability. We have found there’s an entire world of people like Mackay adventuring through life and will continue to highlight them, helping travel and destination marketers get a more accurate picture of the ‘accessibility’ customer. READ MORE on the Rails to Trails blog.

25+ Tech Companies Invited to Participate in TravelAbility “Launchpad”

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illustration of a red rocket launching and the words travel ability launchpad: boosting innovation in travel and accessibility

Tourism marketing organizations would feel more confident proposing or expanding accessibility initiatives if they had a greater knowledge of the latest product innovations and how they can be a valuable competitive differentiator. To address this opportunity, TravelAbilitySummit created LaunchPad, a pre-conference workshop planned for the afternoon of November 11, 2019, in San Francisco. 

LaunchPad will bring together socially conscious entrepreneurs, who have created products and services that  make travel easier for people with disabilities, and established travel end users—hotels, airports, attractions, and destinations. “The goal is to connect entrepreneurs with new distribution channels in the travel industry and to help jumpstart new accessibility initiatives,” says Jake Steinman, founder and CEO of both Launchpad and TravelAbility Summit.  The accessible travel market has been estimated to be in excess of $17 billion dollars* annually and growing at a rapid pace as baby boomers age into a disability.

Leading travel media representatives and angel investors who can provide exposure, advice, and capital to help these companies grow will also be attending. “We have received a commitment from Blue Umbrella,” said Steinman, “a disability technology accelerator that will take part in the workshop and keep office hours during the conference to meet one on one with founders. A list of invited attendees for Launchpad is available here.

The creation of LaunchPad is a result of the TravelAbility Summit team’s deep dive into three categories:

  • –a fast-growing accessible technology market
  • –the disability community’s changing needs
  • –feedback from travel marketers asking for next steps to help them to create meaningful accessibility initiatives.

To that end, TravelAbility released The Fab 50  in February—50 products and services that are available to make the travel experience easier for people with disabilities— and from that list, we’ve invited some of the most affordable and practical to present their products and services at LaunchPad in San Francisco.

“Because there hasn’t been a disability travel conference in the U.S. in over 13 years,” explained Steinman, “there hasn’t been a venue dedicated to new assistive technology, apps, products and services designed to help people with disabilities travel more independently. We are looking forward to watching the sparks fly as these communities come together. We’ll be tracking  the outcome to build the business case for accessibility in travel.”

*2015 Open Doors Study on the Accessible Travel Market

(The Fabulous 50 list will be distributed to over 2400 destinations, hotels, attractions and suppliers in travel and disability communities.