Making Digital Tools and Technologies Accessible to All

Lawrence Weru, MSc ’23, has devoted his career to building digital tools. But even with his technical expertise, he sometimes finds himself denied service when navigating life online.

As someone with a speech impediment, he has struggled to use voice assistants and found some social media platforms inhospitable. Then there’s the time his debit card was frozen because resolving a fraud alert required speaking to a bot that didn’t recognize his voice and didn’t offer an option to talk to a human.

These sorts of frustrations are widely shared. More than 40 million Americans have some type of disability, yet a recent study found that almost 95 percent of the top 1 million homepages had at least one accessibility failure, and many had dozens.

These statistics don’t surprise Weru. During his career as a web developer he heard again and again from clients and colleagues that accessibility is an afterthought, despite evidence that designing with accessibility in mind leads to better experiences for all users. So Weru decided to pursue a master’s degree in media, medicine, and health at HMS. “I wanted to understand why accessibility wasn’t even part of the discussion,” he says, “and I wanted to see if there are ways we can leverage the media to raise awareness.”

Courses in disability law, social medicine, and related fields gave Weru “a holistic understanding of how social systems result in inaccessibility.” The program also expanded his view of accessibility’s implications. “This really is a health issue, and I hadn’t seen that perspective before coming here,” he says.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he notes as an example, some of the websites used for making vaccine appointments weren’t accessible for people with a visual disability, preventing them from being able to sign up.

Today, Weru conducts research and helps organizations create more accessible experiences for their users. He spent two years as an associate in biomedical informatics at HMS, where his work focused on finding ways to make biomedical research tools more accessible. “If those materials aren’t accessible, you’re telling someone they don’t belong in the life sciences,” Weru says. Currently, Weru is an accessibility officer in the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security for the State of Massachusetts, leading the development and implementation of a digital accessibility and equity program in alignment with the state’s accessibility goals.

With each project, Weru is helping expand access to digital tools that are now an essential part of everyday life. Accessibility, he says, is not a “nice-to-have,” but a necessary form of care, rooted in the principle that access is a human right.

Amos Esty is the editor of Harvard Medicine.