By Contributor,Gus Alexiou

Copyright forbes

Glassbox Accessibility unites customer analytics and digital accessibility into a single platform

Digital accessibility for websites and apps may have gained increased focus and attention within the corporate world over the past few years, but to this day, it continues to suffer from a key critical flaw.

This is a tendency towards viewing accessibility issues within their own silo, somewhat disconnected from the company’s core mission and messaging. On the extreme, digital accessibility might be seen as purely a compliance issue – a means of adhering to regulations and avoiding lawsuits and bad publicity. Even for the more enlightened product managers out there, who see the business benefits and are motivated to create a rewarding experience for all users, accessibility endeavors still largely rely on separate expertise and software.

This may be about to change with yesterday’s announced launch of Glassbox Accessibility. Glassbox is an Israel-based customer analytics platform principally serving the financial services sector. It uses AI, alongside other technologies, to monitor over one trillion online customer journeys annually through full session capture with a view to developing a clearer understanding of data patterns and common customer pain points. These might include the filling out of forms, technological issues and fraud prevention. The likes of Citi Bank, SoFi and Credit.com are amongst its customers.

Glassbox Accessibility is set to introduce an innovative and much-needed digital accessibility layer to everyday customer experience data insights. Unlike many other digital accessibility solutions, which scan for issues periodically, Glassbox Accessibility identifies issues in real time through tracking click-by-click interactions, flags them by severity and notifies the relevant team immediately, and in some instances, applies automatic fixes. This more proactive approach to accessibility should help organizations both spot issues earlier and fix them faster.

Though other accessibility tools on the market are increasingly focusing on live monitoring as well, what appears to set Glassbox Accessibility apart is the way in which it has been seamlessly integrated directly into the company’s existing enterprise analytics platform. This amounts to something of a mainstreaming of accessibility by moving it out of its silo and affirming it as a critical aspect of the customer journey. Moreover, this should help in bringing accessibility insights and considerations directly to the attention of important decision-makers who may have previously viewed digital accessibility as a side issue or compliance distraction that can solely be addressed by niche vendors.

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In a media release yesterday, Alex Assim, Chairman of Glassbox, said, “This launch marks a significant milestone in our mission to become the first autonomous customer experience solution in the market.”

“For too long, accessibility has been treated as an add-on. Glassbox is making it a core part of how digital experiences are measured, optimized and improved. We are giving organizations the power to identify and resolve barriers in real time as part of their standard operations.”

Yaron Gueta, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, further added, “Automated crawlers and lab-based checks have helped raise the floor on accessibility, but they miss what matters most: how people with disabilities actually experience your product.

“Accessibility must be verified in the wild, across assistive technologies, devices, and the unplanned paths real customers take. Just as digital monitoring evolved from synthetic pings to real-user monitoring, accessibility must move from periodic audits to continuous, real-world validation. That’s exactly what Glassbox’s new accessibility solution delivers.”

There’s certainly no doubt that currently, the market is crying out for innovative digital accessibility products more than ever due to an ever-tightening global regulatory framework. The European Accessibility Act came into force in June and applies to all companies wishing to sell into the European Union. Next year will also see some long-anticipated important updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act which will have a significant impact on the digital accessibility requirements of public bodies.

The only caveat that may be applied to what could otherwise represent an important technological shift is around the often-contentious term “automation” when applied in this context. Though undoubtedly accessibility automation has come a long way in the past five years and is now part of the mainstream, not the margins, many traditional accessibility evangelists continue to point out that automation cannot solve everything, particularly complex interactions with specific assistive technologies. Therefore, human accessibility experts and user testers with disabilities must always be kept in the loop. Provided that Glassbox Accessibility doesn’t undermine these principles, it has every chance of taking digital accessibility to places it has never been before.

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