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The Business Edge
The Business Edge
Tech Hawks Series: Episode #1 - Breaking Barriers: Digital Accessibility
In the "Tech Hawks" podcast series, Feliciano School of Business faculty member Dr. David Eisenberg, Assistant Professor in the department of Information Management and Business Analytics, discusses key issues facing business, technology and society. In this episode, Dr. Eisenberg speaks with Dr. Alex Cohen, a legally blind business professor at West Chester University, who is also Chief Marketing and Accessibility Officer of Accessible Pharmacy, Inc. Together, they discuss new research into digital accessibility and technological discrimination, as well as the benefits for business leaders of providing accessible options for workers and consumers alike.
Dr. David Eisenberg is an Assistant Professor in the department of Information Management and Business Analyticshas completed two masters degrees, from Virginia Tech and Rutgers University, prior to completing his PhD at New Jersey Institute of Technology. David has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, was named a Georgia Tech Research Institute Fellow, National Science Foundation I-Corps Fellow, George Mason University Mercatus Fellow, Junior Scholar of the American Marketing Association’s Public Policy Conference, Founder's Award recipient and Emerging Scholar of the Society of Business Ethics. He has served as 2023-2025 American Association of Information Systems Future of Work track co-chair, their 2023-2025 Cognitive Information Systems mini-track co-chair, and the 2025 Workplace Equality and Diversity Session Chair for the Society of Business Ethics.
Dr. Alex Cohen, this episode's guest, is an Associate Professor in the Marketing Department at West Chester University, where his research focuses on marketing to the disabled community with the goal of creating a more inclusive marketplace. While earning his Ph.D. in marketing from the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University, he co-authored publications enhancing the assurance of success in online programs for students with disabilities. Prior to beginning his doctoral program, Cohen worked in the hospitality industry for 15 years where his experience includes: holding positions such as director of sales & marketing, general manager, and senior VP of operations. As a non-traditional student, he completed his Master’s degree in hospitality management in an on-line program at Drexel University. Diagnosed at age 20, Cohen has a degenerative retinal disease known as Retinitis Pigmentosa which has robbed him of most of his vision. He lives in downtown Philadelphia with his wife and two young sons, and spends his spare time as an avid runner, novice musician, and remains deeply involved and committed to the Foundation Fighting Blindness.
Hello, I'm David Eisenberg, Assistant Professor in Information Management and Business Analytics Department of the Feliciana Business School at Montclair State University. I'm excited to have you join me today to speak with Dr Alex Cohen about his journey towards makinga difference to research and society in the area of digital accessibility and in the fight against digital discrimination. Welcome, Alex.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, David.
Speaker 1:It's great to be with you so why don't we start by just you telling us a little bit about yourself and your journey to doing the kind of research and having the kind of impact that you do today?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I have a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa that I've had my entire life.
Speaker 2:It's a blinding condition where I lost my sight over a period of time.
Speaker 2:It was first noticeable as a teenager, but then, once I was in my 30s, my sight really diminished and I decided that I actually needed a career change and wanted to become a professor, a marketing professor. And you know, while investigating what it would take to make this career change happen, I was, you know, continually told about you know, how much research is involved and what do you think your area of research is going to be. And I really decided at that time that I wanted to make a difference, initially just in the blind and low vision community, trying to explore the experiences of the blind and low vision consumer in today's marketplace, both online and offline. But as the research grew, you know, it really became much more generalizable beyond just the blind and low vision, into other groups of consumers with a variety of different disabilities, and then actually into different DEI spectrums. And so that's where I really started. Once I was lucky enough to get enrolled in my doctoral program at Drexel University, 100 years ago, whatever that was.
Speaker 1:So can you explain a little bit more about your own condition and what that means, because I think a lot of people listening, as well as myself, may not be completely familiar with that condition.
Speaker 2:Well, so people lose their vision for a variety of different reasons. Degenerative retinal conditions, whether that's retinitis pigmentosa or Stargardt's disease or all sorts of a variety of different maladies, can affect vision over time, can affect vision over time. There's also age-related eye diseases, like you might have heard, like macular degeneration and things like that that normally affect older individuals. But then one of the highest, well, I guess one of the biggest reasons why working age people lose their vision is due to diabetic retinopathy, a complication from diabetes. So I mean, you know it's not a homogenous group by any stretch.
Speaker 2:For example, you know most blind people don't read Braille, for example. You know most blind people don't read Braille. You know, because you come to your vision loss a bit later in life and then become more reliant on digital accessibility, whether that's screen reading software that converts text to speech or, you know, voiceover technology on a smartphone. But people who might have lost their vision, either you know, at birth or much earlier on, might learn to use Braille. So something like Braille buttons in an elevator does very little for me. However, you know, having the elevator tell me what floor I'm at is actually incredibly helpful.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting because I think a lot of people would just assume that you know that everyone who's blind, you know, just automatically understands braille.
Speaker 2:And sometimes I, you know, and I play along. You know, at this point I use a cane to help me navigate the world and I will go into a restaurant and the host will give me a Braille menu and I will say thank you, and I will accept the Braille menu and have it open in front of me while I'm asking the person I'm with what's on the menu, because I do want the person at the restaurant to feel as though their accessibility, effort is really appreciated and so tell me a little bit about how you know, why you decided and how you feel you can make an impact, addressing this issue through business and research as opposed to through, say you know, medicine.
Speaker 2:Well, the marketplace in medicine is very different. You know I am getting more and more involved in healthcare marketing but initially, as things begin, there's still so many opportunities to explore accessibility dimensions in the marketplace and for what retailers and organizations need to know about these customers, not just the blind and low vision, but customers with disabilities in general. If you think about it this way, essentially one in five customers have a disability of some kind that you know prohibit them from accessing the issues, whether it comes from disabilities related to, you know, cognitive impairments or hearing or vision or mobility issues, whatever it might be, there are barriers that need to be overcome with good, universal design approaches, for example, an accessible website. It's not just inaccessible to blind and low vision users using a screen reader to navigate their computer. Think of it this way it could be inaccessible to anybody that, for any reason or any kind of disability, is unable to use a mouse. They can't appropriately navigate that website and are therefore having an unsatisfactory consumer experience with that retailer or with that organization.
Speaker 1:So how have you found the blind and disabled community receptive to what you've been working on and doing in your research?
Speaker 2:Well, they're incredibly receptive because, like me, they feel that this research that we do, that we conduct, can create an appropriate awareness. Now that lends itself, you know, in terms of a research scope, and I've often been told not just by, you know, my colleagues at my university or in my doctoral program that your research is too practical, you need to have more theoretical development, and so you know, I've been working on that, but at some level it's, you know, what's going to make a change in the marketplace. And so initially the thought was like, well, if we bring awareness to these companies, then they'll make everything accessible because it's the right thing to do. It's almost like the Adam Smith invisible hand approach, like doing the right thing is just good for the marketplace to be inclusive and accepting and make everything accessible to all people at all times. And that's a wonderful notion. That doesn't really work. It's not that I feel that there's inaccessibility with NALIS. I don't think that the CEOs of a bunch of these giant retail organizations are meeting together on a skull-shaped island like, hey, what can we do to exclude this entire community? I really don't think it's like that.
Speaker 2:But you also need to show that there are economic consequences to inaccessibility and in some of the research that I was able to conduct, not only, for example, avoidance behaviors, that with inaccessibility issues for consumers with disabilities.
Speaker 2:Yes, there's going to be avoidance behaviors from that direct population based on accessibility issues, but it actually does affect the avoidance behaviors of people without disabilities who hear about these. You know, if I have a lousy time at a restaurant because I'm blind, because I wasn't treated well, or the bad service experience is somehow directly attributable to my disability, that's different than a shared experience that we could all have, where the service is lousy, the food was, you know, quality was poor, the place was dirty, you know whatever like that could be a shared experience that could be felt by anybody. But if I were to tell my brother, who is sighted, about, you know, this restaurant experience I had where I felt that I was poorly treated due to my blindness, um, he would avoid that that restaurant in the future as well. So it's not just the, the directly affected consumer, it's also, uh, radiates out to their non uh, disabled, you know, social network.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. So, kind of getting back into some of the, just to kind of introduce this part of the conversation, alex and I have been working on this research, or kind of a continuation of his research, for the last few years now, for the last few years now, and we just presented a paper at the Society of Business Ethics in Copenhagen, which was a very exciting conference and venue, and so while we were there, the topic of that presentation was to look at how digital accessibility of websites, particularly of job postings and job listings, could lead to people who are visually impaired to not be able to apply for those jobs. When that happens, you know that then could be, you know could be disenfranchising people from work opportunities. How, alex, how does that? How does you know not being able to apply for those job listings you know would affect this particular population?
Speaker 2:you know would affect this particular population. Well, there's already a tremendous economic financial inequality between people with disabilities and without, and just in the blind and low vision community alone, I believe the last statistics were somewhere at an unemployment rate somewhere between 70 and 75 percent, which is astounding. And especially with the advances in technology and so many jobs and career paths being, you know, based through a computer, working remotely, there's really no reason why so many blind and low vision people would be left out of the job market.
Speaker 1:And in which you're a living and you know example and inspiration of someone who has a you know, who has a you know terrific job and is, you know, and happens to be low vision.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm very fortunate. But I also took advantage of the programs that were available to me. So for years I worked in the hotel business. That was. My dream was to be the general manager of hotels and resorts. That's what I went to school for. That's the industry I worked in until the loss of my vision really made that just about impossible. And so I applied for social security disability and got it, because, you know, I have all the appropriate medical documentation saying that I am blind. And so I did that.
Speaker 2:And then I went to the Philadelphia um, uh, pennsylvania office of vocational rehabilitation and the office of blindness and visual services, uh, and they have wonderful um resources available for job training. I said, okay, well, mr Cohen, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I want to be a college professor. And they're like oh well, we haven't had somebody ask about that before. What exactly do you need? And I said, you know what? I'm not exactly sure, let me check. And so I knew people who worked at the Office of Disability Resources at Drexel University, where I was, you know, looking at, looking at the doctoral program, and I asked about, like, well, what type of technology is available if I wanted to go back to school, you know, because being in the hotel business versus being a student are two entirely different things that you know you would need to approach. And so what I did is I built a collaboration. I built a team Team, alex, if you will between the Office of Disability Resources and Blindness and Visual Services and the people at Drexel to come together to give me everything that I need and show me what is available to provide these accommodations to get me through the program.
Speaker 2:And I can tell you that some of the people in my doctoral cohort were a little jealous where I could just sit there and listen to an academic article being read to me through a screen reader, as opposed to having to, you know, read through all these things and scan everything. You know it was a remarkable experience. It was still incredibly difficult. My doctoral program was very challenging, but I really did have a team of people to help me go through and I really had a supportive wife at home and I had young children and I really looked at this as a job and put a lot of strength and energy and determination that like, look, I'm going to make this happen.
Speaker 2:This is going to make my family life better, it's going to make my wife and my children proud and it's going to give me career satisfaction and fulfillment. That you know I'm going to enjoy what I do and I love being a teacher, I love being a professor and working with the university on all the different committees that I'm lucky enough to be part of, and I love doing the research I do and hope that it can, can make a, make a difference. And, yes, um, you know, uh, the research that I do could have, uh, you know, a direct effect on you know myself or other people like me, and, and you know, I, I like Terrific All right.
Speaker 1:So let me see, I think that you know, just to kind of like wrap up, let's talk a little bit about the paper that we presented at the Society of Business Ethics, and so I think that you know in that paper it was specifically talking about kind of the potential, I think, for there to be career discrimination or employment discrimination. You know that could be going on due to people literally not being able to access the job posts that were, you know that are, that are being made available by companies but not in the, not in the format that's recommended by the ADA. Can you talk a little bit about how we figure that out, whether it's accessible or not? And then also, what does it mean to have these ADA or kind of guidelines that are put out that companies are supposed to follow to create their websites and make them accessible for people who are visually impaired?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, that's actually one of the largest challenges, david, is that you know, yes, the ADA was signed into law what July 1990. So we just celebrated a pretty big anniversary for that. But also the trouble with being codified in 1990 is, you know, the internet really was not thought of yet. So the accessibility of that, and so there have been a number of different lawsuits. Now the three major titles of the ADA Title I, title II and Title III, you know, workplace accommodations covers what we were looking at in this paper, or at least you would think it would, and Title III covers public places. So if you were going to go to a physical store or a place that was open to the public, it's supposed to be made accessible, at least according to the ADA, but there weren't specific guidelines adopted within the ADA.
Speaker 2:Now there's the World Wide Web, consortia guidelines. I don't know what point they're up to now. Maybe you do, david. I think it's 3.1. Yeah, I mean, it keeps moving, which actually is wonderful because it's making things more accessible. But, as you would imagine, it also makes it a lot more difficult to push any policy because you're going to say what are you going to adopt and that's going to be the law and but it keeps changing.
Speaker 2:You know, accessibility in and of itself is kind of a moving target based on these, the World Wide Consortia guidelines, especially as the web becomes more and more advanced. Like, if you could think of the you know Internet in the 90s through your prodigy, it was mostly or AOL, it didn't have that many images and actually video was even more difficult or took a lot longer. And so, as processing speeds became faster and the capabilities more and more can be added to these websites and they're incredibly robust, like just you know, if you can imagine the website of a professional sports team and all of the different things that are possibly available on that one website, and trying to make that accessible. It's a heavy lift. Now I'm not saying that that shouldn't happen, um, but it is. It is difficult to adopt specific standards.
Speaker 2:So, um, and for years, decades, and in fact now uh companies could just throw their hands up in the air and say, well, we don't know what to do. We don't know what to do, we don't know how to make this accessible. And that's really not true because the worldwide consortia and other uh, the rehabilitation act of 1973, 504, 508, you know, compliance, uh, that that's for the accessibility of uh government websites, or at least it was at at one time before the the, the W3CG were put into place. So it is difficult. I don't want to just say it's easy. Website developers know that this exists. They know how to make websites accessible.
Speaker 2:In computer science and MIS programs and programming, accessibility is a part of the curriculum and perhaps maybe it should be a larger part of the curriculum because it's not really leaking into the public domain in the way it should. So I don't know if you could. You know, if a company said how do I, you know, wanted to say, how do I make my application process more accessible to potential recruits with disabilities, it would be very easy to find that information. It's not a mystery and it's not a easy to find that information. It's not a mystery and it's not a mystery to the web developers. It's just something that's not happening.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's a good note for us to pause on and thank you again so much for explaining all this and joining me for this talk and, you know, for this talk and and for telling your story.
Speaker 2:Well, absolutely, david. It's been great to be with you and, again, anybody who's looking for information about accessibility or website accessibility it's it's easy to find, but one of the best sources out there is WebAIM. It's W-E-B capital A capital, I capital M dot org. And, you know, try and make your things accessible. It will be worthwhile and everything will be opened up to you. Know a lot more people and you'll be surprised at the capabilities and enthusiasm of this community that's been, you know, unfortunately blocked out due to inaccessibility issues.
Speaker 1:Well, hopefully the research that you're doing is helping to change that. That we're doing, my friend. Thank you All right, okay, thanks. Thanks so much.