In an unequal country on all fronts, the digital world could not be something apart. For every 100 Brazilians, 19 have some visual impairment, seven have motor impairment, five have hearing problems and one person suffers from mental or intellectual impairment. There are at least 45 million Brazilians with some type of disability. A contingent that does not access or browse the web in its entirety. This is the focus of the Israeli startup EqualWeb. “Technology is able to provide scale and speed in solving society’s large and complex problems,” Jaques Haber, head of Impact for the company in Brazil, told DINHEIRO.
Haber, who is married to a wheelchair user, is one of the four partners who brought EqualWeb to the country a year ago – along with Edmundo Fornasari (Institutional head), Marcelo Herskovitz (Marketing head) and Ricardo Hechtman (Innovation head) . From the point of view of lack of accessibility, the Brazilian digital universe is a kind of Blue Ocean of opportunities. According to a survey by BigDataCorp in partnership with the Movimento Web para Todos (WPT), carried out in 2020, of the 14.6 million active websites in Brazil, only a tiny part of 0.74% complies with the accessibility criteria.
The issue is contemplated in the Statute of Persons with Disabilities, law of 2015 which, in its article 63, says that it is “mandatory to have access to websites maintained by companies with headquarters or commercial representation in the country or by government bodies”. This has pushed the corporate world to adapt digitally as well. Today, EqualWeb already has clients the size of Coca-Cola, FGV, Motorola and Suvinil.
The company works with a portfolio of 31 solutions – ranging from Voice Command (the functions are performed through the microphone, a tool for people with limited mobility, absence of arms or hands, paralysis or visual impairment) to Image Description (functionality essential for people with visual impairment). For the creation of tools, EqualWeb uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, making the adaptation of websites cheaper, simpler and faster. No complete reconfiguration of the design is required., nor change the source code of the website. “Technology is currently the greatest ally of inclusion,” said Haber.
The following are excerpts from the interview with Jaques Haber, partner and head of Impacto at EqualWeb.
How are EqualWeb’s results in Brazil?
Jaques Haber – We are going to close the first year with sales close to R$1 million and next year we want to quadruple revenue.
What is the business model?
Equalweb follows the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, with monthly values ranging from R$ 590 to R$ 5,999, depending on the complexity of the website and the number of pages it holds. The company can choose to contract two types of package: one with up to 25 features or another with all 31 features. Sites with more than 1 million pages or more than 5 million visits have values on request.
How to avoid, also in the digital universe, an enabling vision rather than accessibility, very common in the non-virtual world?
Success achieved by a person with a disability is always treated as ‘overcoming’. Capacitism is nothing more than a prejudice similar to so many others, such as racism, homophobia, misogyny or xenophobia, and it highlights our difficulty in treating people with disabilities as equals. Capacitation leaves the essential debate on the need to make the world more inclusive in the background. About offering equal opportunities to a society made up of a great diversity of people. This is equally true for the digital universe.
The world of technology is still immersed in a lot of prejudice, which often migrates to solutions, isn’t it?
Most technology developers are men, most likely white, heterosexual, and non-disabled. It is difficult to find programmers who are blind, deaf or with a physical disability. Those who do not experience pain cannot see the need to offer accessibility. And it is not only in the team of developers that this limited vision is observed, but also among the leaders. It is the lack of representation in the development teams and in the leaders of the companies that perpetuates the prejudice.
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