Dragorad Knezi
Contributor
Dragorad Knezi is the CEO and co-founder of eyezon, an on-demand human-centric social shopping platform.
The inclusive shopping market may just be the largest untapped opportunity in the e-commerce world today.
By one estimate, it totals a staggering $8 trillion. It’s also not as fragmented as you might think. For example, more than 2.2 billion people experience vision impairments, while nearly half a billion have hearing loss.
As a result, brands need to start looking at this as an opportunity, rather than a box to check on their way to social responsibility. The problem is that the various organizations that set the standards for accessibility, such as the W3C, may be well-meaning, but their guidelines are minimal and often unimaginative.
For example, most of them call for tags to describe images. But no tag is going to tell a blind shopper if a scarf would look good on them. Brands can solve this problem — and I’ll get to that — but not through any metadata strategy.
Inclusive design, the kind that meets people where they are, requires innovation, not standards. It has been the unheralded impetus for some of the most widely used inventions in the world, including email, touchscreens and even typewriters. Innovation and inclusive designs have long outstripped the imaginations of regulators and delivered benefits to people far beyond the intended audienc …
