“We have autonomous cars and bots that compose music, but it is not yet guaranteed that a blind person can buy a plane ticket online.”

The WHO estimates that in the world there are more than one billion people with some type of disability, almost 4 million in Spain, according to Cermi.

Technology today presents important barriers for many of them, especially in the case of affectations such as vision or reduced mobility, or blindness.

In this context, ensuring accessibility on websites and mobile applications has gone from being an ethical issue to a legal obligation. However, in practice, technology continues to present accessibility barriers inappropriate for the twenty-first century. “We have cars that drive themselves and bots that compose music, but it is still guaranteed that a blind or partially sighted person can buy a plane ticket online,” warns Juan José Montiel, blind technology developer and head of Accessibility at Pasiona.

Juanjo remembers the hell he had to go through with a trip to Seattle: “They canceled my original flight, and I had to, at the last minute, look for a flight on my own. I found one, but the airline’s website was not accessible, and I was not able to complete the reservation. Fortunately, I found an intermediary website to complete the purchase, but I was about to run out of space and not arrive in time to Seattle, “where I was traveling to give a conference.

And, “beyond complying or not with the law, companies and developers are often not aware of the barriers they generate, unintentionally, when creating inaccessible websites,” warns the head of Accessibility of Pasiona. Giants such as Endesa or Iberia have faced fines of 30,000 euros each for this fact. In addition, since September 2018 the law has been tightened, forcing public or publicly funded bodies to make accessible not only their web portals, but also their native applications.

From Pasiona, Juanjo Montiel leads an Accessibility department that makes available to companies the necessary tools to ensure that their software, websites, apps, etc… They are inclusive. “We believe that accessibility is a way of doing things and doing them well, either from the beginning or by making existing developments inclusive.” And it is that “the disability does not have the person, it is caused by technology when it develops without thinking about inclusion,” concludes Montiel.