Enabling green economy through accessibility

Imagine yourself in front of your local grocery store. For most of us it is a trivial task to access the building, find the items on the shopping list for the dinner and even do some impulsive purchases to make the day for ourselves or our families. Now close your eyes and imagine yourself again in front of the grocery store without vision. Suddenly the tasks become drastically more difficult. From personal experience of observing my blind grandfather, I’d say disability should and does not define the daily life of anyone, though surely there are yet numerous ways how the world could improve in that respect.

During the recent decades, the digital systems and products have conquered a huge share of everything we do in our everyday life both at work and in leisure. Needless to say, the development has made many aspects of our lives easier and more efficient. To make sure everybody benefits from the development, many, even counter-intuitive perspectives must be considered. These considerations aid in providing all with the necessary level of accessibility to cope with the world – like being able to access a grocery store.

A heart-warming great example of digital accessible design is iPhone. Despite my skepticism about compatibility of touch screens and vision constraints, the device has actually made the life of my grandfather much easier. Consider task of checking the weather for the day: before his options would have been to check the weather online (certainly time consuming) or wait for the forecast broadcast on the radio. Now, with the help of the device, he can actually do it anytime he likes through speech in a matter of seconds. Even though it might sound like a minor thing for most of us, for him it is a huge improvement in how he can make sense of the world. This is, basically, why it is so crucial to consider and implement accessibility.

Now, you might consider, what on earth has that to do with Grexel or energy certification in general. The fact is that Grexel’s products serve thousands of individuals with a great diversity in their abilities and requirements. This means our products must also meet the sufficient level of accessibility standards to make sure anyone can get their job done without issues. Although Grexel is not yet implementing an energy certification registry operable through speech, we take accessibility seriously. These considerations have been crucial in the development of our new generation energy certificate registry G-REX.

In practice, the soon-to-be published registry does not only look great, but it’s design and implementation follow the WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standard to ensure the accessibility for anyone who might be working with it. As the leading service-provider in the field of energy certification, Grexel certainly hast to strive to fulfill its responsibility also in terms of inclusivity. We want to make sure that enabling the green economy is not blocked from anyone because inaccessible or dysfunctional tools.