Empathy is far greater than Sympathy

Decade back whenever I use to have an encounter with visually impaired people I use to feel sympathetic towards them. Use to wonder it must be so difficult for them to do normal day to day life and they must be always dependent on others.Yeah! many of you must have thought like me, right?

This was my misconception until I got an opportunity to work with an organization which was in the field of providing accessibility solutions. This was a place where i got to interact with people with disabilities, understanding the difficulties they face and how independent they are if things are accessible. Everyone has a right to access every application irrespective of age, sex or disability.

Accessibility is a topic which is given least importance in curriculum as well as in our day to day life. Accessibility is not a difficult topic but definitely an important topic. As the word itself says it all, ability of an individual irrespective of its disability to access the web, the real world.

So how do we make the web accessible? Yes, many must be wondering about it. Hence the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has developed a set of guidelines, success criteria, technical specification and educational resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities.These Guidelines are called as the Web Content Accessible Guidelines . As the technology changes the guidelines are been updated to cover most of the issues faces by everyone.So next time you develop an application do refer the guidelines to make your product accessible. Remember you are not the end user of your product. And for the product to be used by all it has to be accessible.

Sympathy is temporary, empathy lets you take the right move. Lets feel the difficulties people face and build accessible products.