Project Euphonia by Google is another technology in this realm. It uses artificial intelligence to help decode human speech. Persons who have atypical speech can provide voice samples to help the AI learn to understand more diverse ways of speaking. This data can be used to advance speech recognition, giving more people the option to use voice-controlled technology moving forward.

Some reasons why that's the case are tied to the sheer volume of digital content and the complexity of the internet. For businesses and content creators who want to reach the widest audiences possible and meet the expectations of all users, including those with disabilities, the dynamic nature of content poses an ongoing challenge. Consumers today expect personalized content, interactive features, and intuitive interfaces to find information, shop, get entertainment, etc. This level of personalization requires continuous changes in content based on user behavior, preferences, and other data. Unfortunately, every change comes with a risk of making content inaccessible for users with disabilities.

Such lawsuits have risen steadily, to about 3,500 in 2020 from roughly 2,900 in 2019 and about 2,300 in 2018, UsableNet said. The company predicts more than 4,000 such lawsuits for all of 2021 if trends hold. E-commerce companies are sued most often, accounting for 74% of federal cases between Jan. 1 and June 21, the report said. Rounding out the top five categories were digital media and agencies, finance, food service and healthcare, each accounting for less than 5% of the total. Get weekly insights into the ways companies optimize data, technology and design to drive success with their customers and employees. Companies with revenue below $50 million were the targets of two-thirds of lawsuits between Jan. 1 and June 21, a shift from the year-earlier period, when the share was less than half, UsableNet said.

Images and videos are critical for ensuring user engagement on the web. For instance, on a retail website, images of a product from different angles or a 360-degree video of the product can lead to higher conversion rates. For a news website, users are more likely to read articles with visual media accompanying the content. It has been reported that posts that include images produce a 650-percent higher user-engagement rate than text-only posts. Communicating intent to users through contextual images and videos is important.

Jonathan Lazar (jlazar@towson.edu) is a professor of computer and information sciences and director of the Undergraduate Program in Information Systems at Towson University, Towson, MD, and recipient of the SIGCHI 2016 Social Impact Award. Elizabeth Churchill (churchill@acm.org) is a director of user experience at Google, San Francisco, CA, and Secretary/Treasurer of ACM. Tovi Grossman (tovi.grossman@autodesk.com) is a distinguished research scientist in the User Interface Research Group at Autodesk Research, Toronto, Canada. Gerrit C. van der Veer (gerrit@acm.org) is an emeritus professor of multimedia and culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, guest professor of human-media interaction at Twente University, Twente, the Netherlands, of human-computer and society at the Dutch Open University, Heerlen, Netherlands, of interaction design at the Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China, and of animation and multimedia at the Lushun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang, China. Philippe Palanque (palanque@irit.fr) is a professor of computer science at Université Paul Sabatier Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III, France, and head of the Interactive Critical Systems research group of the IRIT laboratory, Toulouse, France. John "Scooter" Morris (scooter@cgl.ucsf.edu) is an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California San Francisco and executive director of the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization and Informatics, a U.S. National Institutes of Health Biomedical Technology Research Resource at the University of California San Francisco. Jennifer Mankoff (mankoff@cs.cmu.edu) is a professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.