Work with disabled people to design transformative digital assistive tools and tackle accessibility barriers, says Royal Society report
23 June 2025Tech companies, researchers and governments should do more to remove barriers and engage disabled people in the design of digital assistive tools and services, to maximise the transformative benefits they can bring, a Royal Society report has said.
The Disability technology report, from the UK’s national academy of sciences, identifies digital assistive technologies (DigAT), from screen readers to smartphone navigation apps, as critical tools for the 1.3bn disabled people worldwide to live fulfilled, independent lives.
Its findings have been developed by a committee of international researchers and technology experts, many of whom have lived experience of disability, and draws on focus groups, surveys and research with disabled people and leading technology figures.
The report emphasises disabled people should be included at the earliest stages of policy and technology design and that more should be done to make DigAT accessible through training, funding and infrastructure.
Dr Hamied Haroon, Research Fellow in Quantitative Biomedical MR Imaging, University of Manchester and a member of the Royal Society Diversity and Inclusion Committee’s Disabled Scientists Subgroup, said:
“We shouldn’t be developing assistive technologies or policies without disabled people being front and centre of the process.
“How do you capture the day-to-day challenges faced by disabled people, or ensure you’re offering solutions that actually work, unless you talk to disabled people?”
More than half of disabled DigAT users surveyed for the report said they could not live the way they do without such technology, however there are significant barriers to access.
Disabled people in the UK are almost twice as likely as non-disabled people to be unemployed, and the report highlights the average disabled household faces over £1,000 a month in extra costs.
This makes the high price of many assistive technologies needed for work or daily life prohibitive and the report calls for measures to address digital exclusion through training, funding and regulation.
It also recommends governments recognise smartphones as an assistive technology – in the same way as wheelchairs and hearing aids - and factor this into the provision of essential services like health, education, and internet access.
“These assistive technologies are fundamental to the workplace and our daily tasks – but they can be prohibitively expensive or unusable in some settings,” said Dr Haroon.
“We need to look at removing these barriers, whether that’s costs, additional training, or infrastructure improvements – like addressing patchy mobile data services that can cut off disabled people in rural and deprived areas.”
The report also proposes a rethink in the way disability data is recorded by statistics bodies. This should include more data on the daily challenges many people experience with their sight, mobility, and memory, rather than solely focusing on self-reported disability identity.
This would support policy makers, scientists and technology companies to ensure public services, research and digital tools are genuinely responsive to disabled people’s needs. This will only become more important as data-driven and AI technologies continue to advance rapidly.
Sir Bernard Silverman FRS, Emeritus Professor of Statistics, University of Oxford and Chair of the report’s Steering Committee, said:
“This report explores the central part that digital technologies and their underpinning data can play in supporting disabled people to live full, productive lives. As a statistician, I would particularly stress that the data we record, and how we categorise it, affects everything and everyone.
“Data on the functional challenges experienced by disabled people would help researchers and providers to ensure that digital products and services, especially in the AI age, are genuinely responsive to their needs.”