The misguided antitrust bills targeted at online marketplaces—American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and Open App Markets Act (OAMA)—haven’t been reintroduced yet but are still lurking in the shadows of the 118th Congress. As we’ve pointed out, the costs small business developers would bear if either of the bills were enacted include the loss of some of the most basic consumer protection features consumers and developers rely on in the app economy to preserve privacy and protect intellectual property. For the same reasons, the most popular accessibility features developers leverage to reach broad audiences would also fall victim to AICOA and OAMA.
Just as app makers strive to build privacy into their offerings from the ground up with privacy by design, they also have a strong incentive to ensure people with all abilities can use them effectively. For example, the developer of an app that helps caregivers remotely screen and monitor patients with neurological disorders needs to ensure that those with cognitive disabilities can effectively use it. Similarly, an augmented reality app designed to tour homes could include voice descriptions of what appears on the screen for users with vision impairments.
For small app companies, these features historically existed as add-ons for consumers to seek on their own and too often did not present themselves as practical options for integration into the app everyone downloads. Some examples at the top of the American Federation for the Blind’s list of screen readers would certainly require sight to install and set up, but also at least some facility with software (although setting up on mobile operating systems appears to be easier for some tools than on a desktop). Requiring people with disabilities to lean on others to integrate these features for them as aftermarket tools is a costly method of providing accessibility and is not ideal for app companies that want their offerings to be accessible out of the box.
This is where software marketplaces have improved the landscape for developers and consumers with disabilities. For example, Apple’s VoiceOver allows a consumer to activate it with a verbal command to Siri or via an Accessibility Shortcut on the device. We’ve talked about how the platforms provide developers with open access to a wide range of application programming interfaces (APIs), and the VoiceOver API is a great example. If a developer wants to ensure their app is accessible for those with vision impairments, they can integrate the VoiceOver API instead of building a separate functionality themselves. Or they could rely on their customers downloading third-party aftermarket tools, which has previously been the norm.
Because AICOA and OAMA would presumptively prohibit software platforms from preferencing their own offerings on the platforms, it would no longer make sense for them to offer these accessibility tools as they are structured now. The problem with this outcome, of course, is that their integration with the operating systems and devices people use is a major part of what makes them feasible, effective, and affordable for developers and consumers. Not only that, but their disappearance from the marketplace would turn back the clock for smart device owners with disabilities so that they would once again have to rely primarily on aftermarket options. And those options would entail a greater resource investment in integrating them, a higher and unnecessary cost over and above the built-in feature option. Consequently, bills like OAMA and AICOA must be stopped in order to preserve and build upon the innovative gains we’ve made in accessibility.