Our purpose
Those who cannot access and use technologies are increasingly being put at a distinct economic, social, and educational disadvantage in comparison to those who do have access.
Digital technologies now shape nearly every aspect of life, from education and employment to healthcare, civic engagement, and daily living.
When technologies are not designed to be inclusive, people can be excluded due to disability, literacy level, digital literacy, language, aging, or other factors. As our world becomes increasingly technology-driven, inclusive design is essential to ensure that everyone can participate fully and live independently.
Vision
A world where everyone — regardless of ability, literacy, age, language, or socio-economic status — can understand, access, and use the digital technologies they encounter, and fully participate in society.
Mission
Our mission is to ensure that everyone can fully participate in the digital society. We work to remove digital barriers and transform how technologies are designed and delivered, because full participation in our society, democracy, and economy is a right, not a privilege.
We design and deploy tools and solutions, embed accessibility and inclusion into projects and development processes, contribute to standards and policy, and collaborate with partners to drive systemic change in an increasingly digital world.
We work to:
- Increase awareness that solutions exist. Ensure people know that digital barriers are solvable, and that tools and supports are available.
- Make solutions easier to discover and access, anywhere in the world. Connect people and organizations to the tools, services and supports that addresses their digital needs.
- Enable people of all digital literacy levels to confidently use technology. Design and deploy tools that make digital technologies understandable, usable, and adaptable, even for those with little or no prior experience.
- Ensure solutions follow the user across devices and platforms. Make it possible for personal accessibility and usability supports to appear on any digital technology a person encounters, already set up for them.
- Ensure design reflects human uniqueness. Advance approaches that reflect diverse identities, contexts, situations, and both permanent and temporary abilities, presenting information in ways people can best see, hear, read, process, and understand.
- Integrate inclusion and accessibility across the full lifecycle of projects and technologies. Work cross-functionally within initiatives, standards, and development processes to ensure digital solutions are inclusive of the full diversity of our world.
- Strengthen the ecosystem of innovation. Make it easier for innovators and organizations to create better solutions – faster, more affordably, and more sustainably – including solutions serving small or underserved populations.
We support open standards, open access, and open source technology wherever possible in order to maximize distribution and to encourage broad participation.
Our experts are also participating in a wide range of standardisation processes in Canadian, American and European standardisation bodies, contributing to make the world a more inclusive place to live.
The community working with Raising the Floor has grown to over 300 individuals and over 50 companies, universities and organizations. It includes people and organizations of all points of view and interests: consumers, developers, researchers, practitioners, policy people, vendors, and manufacturers of mainstream and assistive technology. They hail from all parts of the world including every continent except Antarctica.