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Awareness is important but on this Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we are wishing for bigger changes to reduce friction, reduce costs, and create better markets and incentives for accessibility.

Logins are critical to the digital world. We need them to keep the bad guys out of our stuff. This includes everything from our email, bank, social media, and e-commerce accounts. And that necessarily creates barriers, which can sometimes present accessibility issues. UX, engineering, and security professionals designing login systems have the difficult task of balancing ease of use with safeguards to keep bad actors out. Following accessibility principles and best practices, including new success criteria for accessible authentication in the brand new WCAG 2.2 release, can ensure that login systems don’t lock out people with disabilities.

Digital accessibility is addressed in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act to be exact. It requires all federal agencies and departments to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities, including both employees and members of the public. This includes websites, PDFs, and digital kiosks. The requirements also apply to federal government digital procurement as well as some bodies that receive federal funding.

Disabilities are more than health conditions. Under specific circumstances, all of us will experience mismatches between use cases and our abilities.

So you’ve just learned about accessibility. Now what? The good news is that it’s never too late and there are steps you can take to make an immediate impact. But what should you do first?