Embedding accessibility into healthcare solutions

One of the 5 challenges for this Hackathon was centred around embedding accessibility into healthcare solutions

Why this matters?

Approximately 15% of the global population lives with a disability. Accessibility issues are any barriers that make it difficult or impossible for disabled users to access, navigate, or engage with digital content.

Web accessibility issues are only the tip of the spear when it comes to addressing digital accessibility requirements that can be extended and applied to all forms of digital content, including document optimization and images. The international standards set out by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the American Disabilities Act (ADA) have identified common web accessibility issues and have created a list of standards that are classified under 4 key principles.

The ask:

We asked participants to develop a solution that optimizes accessibility requirements that an organization can utilize to make their solutions digitally accessible. 

Apart from web accessibility, document accessibility and transformation is another barrier for those with disabilities. PDF's and medical results are not human readable, or device agnostic for those who have visual impairments and rely on braille readers.

Web accessibility encompasses the design and practice of removing barriers from digital content design to make content accessible for those with visual, auditory, cognitive or mobility challenges. We saw submissions that were accessibility checkers that could be implemented over any digital content to provide a compliance score with prompts for improvement.

The OpenText Difference

For this Hackathon, we provided participants access to our developer solutions which included use of the Information Management Services API's and allowed participants to utilize other teach stacks and API's to aid the build of their solution. The Information Management Services API's includes a set of API's that are meant to digitally transform data so it can be utilized in more meaningful ways. For this particular challenge, we wanted to see how participants could leverage the OpenText API's (hint: Capture, Metadata and View services) to ingest digital content and transform the data so it could be made accessible for devices, websites or digitally enhanced. Head over to the winners page to read about the winner's solution.