Notes # 21: Economic Power Of The Disabled, Peru & Turkey, Accessible Maps...

Personal Notes

On August 6, we at Turkish Technology will be hosting an exciting accessibility roundtable in our office building. In partnership with brick institute and Binclusive, product and design professionals from various organizations across different sectors are invited to discuss their accessibility efforts. We will try to gather best practices, listen to challenges, and discuss potential solutions. I believe this will be a very valuable workshop for Turkey’s accessibility ecosystem to explore ways to mainstream accessibility into workflows. You can still apply via this Luma link to participate.

News

New Study Highlights The Growing Economic Power Of The U.S. Disability Consumer Market

Source: Harvard Kennedy School

A new study estimates that working-age Americans with disabilities now hold $675 billion in disposable income, which equals 6.8% of the total U.S. disposable income. The authors encourage companies to view accessibility as a business strategy rather than simply a compliance obligation, arguing that organizations can unlock new opportunities for growth. The study also highlights an inequality: we know that approximately 15–20% of the U.S. population is disabled, yet they hold only 6.8% of disposable income. This shows a significant economic gap between the disabled and non-disabled communities.

Peru: When An Accessibility Law Ends Up Creating New Barriers

Source: Pressenza

Dear Turkish readers, please read this article and think about our digital accessibility directive (10/2025). I also wrote an "In Detail" section explaining why I see these laws as parallel. In Peru, “The law stipulates that Peruvian Sign Language interpretation services must be provided by certified or accredited interpreters … The problem arises when this requirement is enacted without the government itself having implemented a national system for training, certification, accreditation, and registration that would enable professionals to meet this requirement.” I am sure that businesses in Peru cannot understand what they should do, and when they start to see the gaps in the law, accessibility will become an un-serious and trivial issue for them.

Minnesota Uses Accessibility To Improve Maps' Communication

Source: GovTech

To comply with the digital accessibility rules for state and local governments (the delayed ADA Title II), digital maps must be made accessible as well. Minnesota IT Services has done great work implementing high-contrast design, keyboard compatibility, alt text, and other accessibility enhancements. The good news is that they also published a resource center explaining what should be done and how. I love this kind of open-source sharing while improving our own work.

Inspirations

A 10th-Anniversary Reflection For Accessibility in the News Subscribers

Source: Jack McElaney

I have been following the 'Accessibility in the News' newsletter for two years, and it was the main inspiration for me to start the Accessibility Notebook. You can find many great updates and blog articles from the US and around the world. In the 10th-anniversary article, Jack McElaney summarizes his knowledge and shares key insights into the field of accessibility. I especially recommend reading the year-by-year developments and the ten themes.

Many Cancer Survivors Have Impairments That Make Using Mobile Devices And Websites Difficult

Source: The Conversation

There is a term called “chemo brain,” which refers to “a cognitive impairment related to chemotherapy that affects memory, focus, and word-finding.” That’s why cancer survivors may experience difficulty in reading text, following instructions, and navigating websites. For this reason, accessibility measures can enhance the experience of cancer survivors as well. Using bullet points instead of big blocks of text, incorporating more visuals and icons, and using larger fonts with high contrast between text and background are some of the recommendations. Accessibility is always beneficial for more people than expected.

The Brain Doesn’t Care About WCAG, It Cares About Cognitive Effort

Source: A11y With Diana

There are many automatic testing tools for accessibility. But none of them fully meet my expectations. Either their error explanations are hard to understand, or they report errors that are not actually errors. Because of this, there are very few tools we can recommend to test teams. However, the tools Diana Khalipina collected in her article “show” how assistive technologies experience the system. These are very useful tools both for understanding accessibility and doing basic checks.

In Detail: Brief History Of Presidential Circular 10/2025

Read this article on its own page

On June 21, 2025, a presidential circular titled Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications was published in Turkey. The circular required private institutions across different sectors to make their digital channels accessible within one year. Accessibility was to be rendered sustainable through the monitoring of various commissions that were to be established. Additionally, accessible digital channels would be awarded an accessibility logo to increase visibility. These developments made us all very excited. On the other hand, the one-page circular contained very little information regarding the commissions.

In February 2026, a directive outlining how the commissions would operate was added somewhere on the Ministry’s website (if I searched for it now, I wouldn’t be able to find it again). Institutions that had been waiting 8 months for a directive were left without detailed guidance in this document.

By June 2026, one year had passed since the publication of the circular. The Ministry’s checklist, which covers WCAG Level A criteria, was updated to include detailed information.

It is now August, and we still do not know how the audits will be conducted or how we can apply to the Ministry to obtain the accessibility logo. Official channels only yield generic responses, so we wait.

Conclusion: Institutions that care about accessibility prioritized the issue and carried out their work from the moment the circular was released. However, they are now asking, "We did our homework, now what?" As accessibility experts, we cannot answer them. We fear that legal regulations are losing their gravity.

Reading the news from Peru brought this process to mind. When legal regulations are not issued with the right framework and guidance, the implementation timeline suffers. This disrupted timeline, in turn, causes laws to lose their seriousness. What is written on paper fails to be applied in practice, and at the end of the day, everyone knows that this is how it will turn out.