Silicon Savanna Speaks: When Mobile-First Meets Accessibility

What does digital accessibility look like in a mobile-first continent with 1.4 billion people speaking hundreds of languages across 50+ countries? Irene Mbari-Kirika, Executive Director and Founder of inABLE, takes us on an illuminating journey through Africa's rapidly evolving accessibility landscape.

The conversation begins with inABLE foundational work teaching digital skills to blind students in Kenya. This initial focus quickly expanded when Irene recognized that teaching assistive technology wasn't enough—the digital products themselves needed to become accessible. Six years ago, this realization sparked the creation of Inclusive Africa, now a thriving conference bringing together disability advocates, tech companies, and most importantly, young people with disabilities who understand technology and can drive innovation.

Kenya emerges as a surprising accessibility leader throughout our discussion. Recently, Kenya's president signed legislation mandating compliance with the country's accessibility standards (based on EN 301 549), making it the first African nation to take such a decisive step. Building on this momentum, inABLE is collaborating with standards bodies across Africa to develop a continent-wide accessibility standard—recognizing that fragmented country-by-country approaches would delay progress by decades.

What makes Africa's accessibility journey particularly fascinating are its unique challenges and opportunities. With the youngest population globally and high youth unemployment, the accessibility sector represents an untapped employment frontier. Currently lacking accessibility specialists, designers, and developers, Africa has the chance to build accessibility practices from the ground up rather than retrofitting existing systems. We explore how AI is already transforming accessibility in Africa, with innovations like avatar-based sign language solutions addressing the complex challenge of multiple sign language variations across different communities.

Join us for this eye-opening conversation about digital inclusion in Africa and discover why investing in young people with disabilities might be the key to unlocking accessible technology across the contine

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Irene and Enable
• 2:24 Inclusive Africa Conference Journey
• 5:28 Innovation and Mobile-First Challenges
• 8:22 Youth Engagement in Accessibility
• 12:36 Kenya's Leadership in Accessibility Standards
• 19:15 Employment Opportunities and Skills Development
• 25:38 AI Applications for Accessibility in Africa

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:00

Hello and welcome to AXSChat Deborah today. She's waiting for the broadband engineers to bring her into the 21st century, but she'll be back soon. So it's just me and Antonio and our guest today, Irene Mbari-Kirika, who is the exec director and founder of , which is based in Kenya, which is based in Kenya. I last caught up with Irene at the Xero project and conference in Vienna earlier this year. Irene's been doing great stuff. It's not the first time I've asked her to come on the show, but it's the first time we've actually made it happen. So welcome Irene. It's really great to have you with us. Can you tell us a little bit more about and the work that you're doing?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 0:45

Fantastic. Thanks for having me, Neil. I know we've been talking for a long time, so definitely it's an honor to be here. So is a nonprofit organization based in the US and in Kenya and really we focus on disability and technology and this is one of our primary initial programs. It was really teaching blind students digital skills and that's how I sort of got into the disability and accessibility space and in the process of teaching students digital skills, then you realize all these products that young people are trying to use are not accessible. So really we focus on digital accessibility and really ensuring that young people with disabilities youth have the right digital skills they need to be able to thrive. And, of course, we work very hard in terms of creating awareness about accessibility across Africa.

Neil Milliken: 1:42

Yeah, in many ways that sounds similar to my journey into accessibility. I started with assistive tech and then moved into the world of accessibility, because there's only so much you can do with the assistive tech if it doesn't work with mainstream tech. So you know we need to be thinking about the ecosystem and also training and skills and all of those other things. So it's clear that you're taking that ecosystem approach. Now you've very recently held a conference, inclusive Africa. So what were some of the topics that were there? And I know there were quite a lot of the great and the good of accessibility participating there. So tell us there were quite a lot of the great and the good of accessibility participating there. So tell us a little bit more about Inclusive Africa and 2025, because I know it's not the first one either.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 2:33

Yeah, yeah. So, first off, Inclusive Africa 2025 was the sixth one, our sixth edition, and I have to say it's something that makes me extremely proud, because the reason for starting Inclusive Africa was number one we were not getting any attention on our digital skills training programs for young people with disabilities and we needed to figure out how do we become relevant, how do we create awareness and show the importance of the digital skills. And also the other piece was just creating awareness about all these digital products in the market, especially the African continent, are not accessible. So that's how we sort of started, and it started as a simple idea. I remember trying to collaborate with a number of partners from the US to see how can we roll out together. That piece didn't work, so we decided to go it alone. Where we're going to start from scratch, do everything ourselves, and sitting in the room two weeks ago to just see the sixth edition and sort of looking back at where we began, when it was just an idea, and seeing the progress we've made in terms of one partnerships We've developed great, great partnerships and when we look at the sessions that we are hosting, what we hosted last year compared to the previous year and compared to now is totally different. In terms of.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 3:55

When I talk about growth, that's what I can say. That's where I see the growth, the growth in content, the growth in the people who are attending the conference itself, the speakers, just different groups of people, and even just getting to understand the need for accessibility in the African continent. Because Africa is mobile, first, and we have more than 50 countries, mostly speaking English, but we have other languages, we have French and sometimes the Francophone countries are left out. We have Portuguese, we have different types of also people speaking not just English, but other tribes, other languages that are local. In Kenya, we speak Swahili. Swahili, if you think about Swahili, it's one of the top languages in the world by the United Nations because it has about 200 million people speaking Swahili. So when you think about all this and the accessibility issues that come, whether it's based on language, location, the products that you have, then for us, it really creates a need for us to really expand the Inclusive Africa and to make sure we grow in the right direction grow in the right direction.

Neil Milliken: 5:07

Yeah, I mean, I know that we actually we do quite a lot of work in Francophone Africa because we're a French headquartered company and there is a real difference in the sort of approach to assistive technology and some of them, sometimes the maturity of approaches to accessibility in Francophone Africa, as you say, some of it gets left behind.

Neil Milliken: 5:24

Accessibility in francophone Africa, as you say, some of it gets left behind.

Neil Milliken: 5:29

One thing that we did learn through running innovation competitions with GIZ was that there is a lot of innovation in Africa, that there are people trying to address the sort of local language, local text-to-speech issues and that quite often the approach of US-based hyperscalers and so on isn't necessarily exactly going to fit the context of Africa. Because, yes, some of the large cities have fantastic broadband and connectivity but lots of areas don't. So sending stuff off to the cloud for processing means that it's not robust. So if you have a reliance on assistive tech and you're trying to send it off to the cloud and you're not in an area with fantastic coverage, then that's not going to work. So it was a learning experience for me. Do you now find that the partners that you are attracting from some of these large organizations that you are attracting from some of these large organizations understand the differences and the sort of geographical and cultural differences and approaches, or do you think that they're coming to something like Inclusive Africa because it's an opportunity for them to learn?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 6:37

So actually that's a really good question, because I do remember one of our primary partners, who's been there since inception. When I pitched the idea of inclusive Africa to them, the one thing they said is we know we do business in Africa, but we don't understand disability and we don't understand accessibility in Africa. So we are happy to come on board to learn with you as you explore opportunities in the continent. So there's a huge aspect of learning, but at the same time, there's also sometimes, when you have some of these companies that already have great experience, there's also an opportunity to share knowledge, because when I look at the West, accessibility has been there for a long time. In Africa we are still on ground zero. In Africa, we've done phenomenal work in disability, in creating policies, in creating a solid foundation so that now accessibility can thrive, but we haven't done much work in accessibility partners from other regions. What happens is that, as much as they're learning, they also create an opportunity for us to learn from them. So it's really a knowledge sharing sort of environment.

Antonio Santos: 7:50

So in every country has different needs, different cultures, different approaches to accessibility and even different ways of looking at disability. You know, in some areas people struggle more to identify themselves to say you know, my kid has a disability and I have a disability. From your experience of running this event, what positive impact can you identify from it in terms of generating a culture of change and making this a kind of a part of a normal conversation, like any other conversation about technology?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 8:29

Yeah. So that's a great question and I think the one thing I see that I celebrate all the time is the fact that Africa has done a phenomenal job in terms of coming up working on the disability space. Taken is as we work, as we sort of create awareness on accessibility in private sector, in government, we've made a conscious effort to bring in young people with disabilities, the youth, the ones who are between the age of 21 to 40 to 35. Why do I say this? Because most of them are very tech savvy and if I take an older person with disability and I'm telling them about these 20 applications, you'll throw them off. But if you go to these young generations, the millennials, the Gen Zs, what you'll find is they use so many products so they quickly connect with what you're saying. They have the solutions, they know what needs to be done.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 9:31

So we've also made sure that Inclusive Africa is making sure that we are creating a platform for young people to learn about accessibility but to share their lived experiences on accessibility.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 9:42

So we have a lot of young people with disabilities who come to the conference for that purpose and our goal is to continue to help them grow in the accessibility space so that currently they are the users. They hold the expertise and the knowledge that's needed to redesign products, so we want to make sure they also understand the technical part of it so that they're able to take this and run with it and become the accessibility champions that are needed to help Africa as a continent thrive. Remember, africa has a population of almost 1.4 billion people. So if you look at a percentage of almost 15% living with some form of disabilities, and then we are mobile first, africa is mobile first. Then there's a need to make sure that digital assets across the continent, products and services are accessible. So for us, an easy way to do it is to work with youth with disabilities to really help champion the accessibility agenda.

Antonio Santos: 10:39

So, talking about young people and let's say, if they try to follow a route of entrepreneurship, do you feel that there's support and ways for them to build what they want and somehow find a way to scale what they build within the continent?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 10:58

So the answer to that is yes and no. So we've just started the journey. So there's a lot of entrepreneurship programs. There's a lot of young people in Africa who are entrepreneurs, but the subject of accessibility is still very new, so there's still a need for support for them to be able to thrive in the accessibility space. And my hope is that, as we continue to mentor and to provide the knowledge and education and certifications needed and experience needed by the young people with disabilities in the accessibility space, then after that they'll be free to become the sort of entrepreneurs they want to become, because if you're really an entrepreneur in nature, once you're trained and you have experience in something, you'll become unstoppable, you'll become creative and keep going.

Neil Milliken: 11:43

So we've touched on some of it already in terms you said. You know that Africa has been good as a continent in terms of creating the policies and starting to adopt standards, and Kenya has been in the lead in some of that. I know that when the first Global Disability Summit was hosted, it was a joint venture between IDA, united Kingdom and the Kenyan government, and why do you think it was that Kenya decided that it wanted to lead in this space or felt that it was necessary to, and also in terms of adoption of standards, because Kenya basically ratified EN 301 549, adopted the European standard. Why do you think it was that Kenya felt that it was necessary to lead in this was?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 12:31

that Kenya felt that it was necessary to lead in this. Yeah, so, first off, kenya is simply a very innovative country and that's why it's called the Silicon Sabana. There are all sorts of innovations if you come there. Young people and I'm sure now you've seen on social media, young people are very creative and there's nothing they cannot develop or design or get into at a very young age. So that really creates a very good environment, because already you have people who have interest, skills, and some of them are self-taught by the way, it doesn't necessarily mean they went to some computer science school.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 13:07

But also having a very active disability community really helps, because in this case, as I said, kenya has enough policies, not just Kenya, but Africa. But Kenya is always leading in the game and I'll give an example Kenya is the first country to develop an accessibility standard, which you just mentioned, neil very similar to the EN 301, 549 in the European Union 549, the European Union. And the beauty of that standard is that two weeks, maybe four weeks ago, when I was in Nairobi, the president of Kenya signed into law, signed a law that now mandates compliance to accessibility standards. And that's huge because now that's massive.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 13:51

Yeah, that's massive by itself. So that shows the sort of environment that we have in Kenya in terms of progress, and our hope is that we do not want the other countries in Africa to get left behind. So what has happened? Through relationships with the Kenya Standards Board, the Africa Standards Board, as we are talking to different organizations day, the Africa Standards Bodies, we are talking to different organizations, we are collaborating to actually kick off the development of Africa's digital accessibility standard. Why is this important? My mobile phone or your mobile phone does not change because you've gone to Africa or anything.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 14:26

So we need from the assessment that some of these bodies did. They say that there's a need to have a standard that's regional, and the beauty of it is in Africa there's a standards body that develops regional standards, so sometimes they'll develop standards for South and African countries, for North and African countries, for Western Africa, for the whole continent, for Eastern African countries. So this time the discussions we are having is how can we develop a standard for Africa? And we'll have all African countries that are interested participating. They already have guidelines and processes in place as to how that should be done.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 15:03

Now, why do we want to do that? So that then each country can be able to start implementing the laws they need to be able to start implementing the standard. But if we wait for every country to someday develop their own standards, it will take us another century. So all we're doing is really creating an enabling environment for accessibility to thrive in the continent. And yes, it started from Kenya, but now we want to make sure other countries across the continent that are interested can actually work collaboratively with us to promote accessibility across the continent, that are interested can actually work collaboratively with us to promote accessibility across the continent.

Neil Milliken: 15:38

I spent some time working on standards and I can recognize how important it is. I can honestly say that standards creation is not for me I'm a dyslexic ADHDer is not for me. I'm a dyslexic ADHDer. I am too twitchy to sit on meetings dotting the I's and crossing the T's, so anyone that does this has my utmost respect. But I recognize the importance of the standards and also the harmonization as far as possible.

Neil Milliken: 16:09

Clearly we understand that things are operated in a mobile-first context, that there are similarities in the devices, but also some regional changes in how the operating systems work, the language and all of these things that need to be taken into account.

Neil Milliken: 16:24

But I take heart from the fact that you're adopting, at least as a basis, something like EN 301549, which also includes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines criteria, so that it becomes easier for organizations that provide technology to understand and provide that accessibility, because if you get fragmentation it gets really hard. Technology company point of view, where I'm building, I'm trying to look at the entirety of our portfolio as a multinational company and think about how accessible that is If the standards are all different and asking us to do different things. It makes it almost impossible, even if the laws reference slightly different standards. Now we know that, for the most part, the technical requirements are pretty similar, and so we can start at least addressing the bulk of this in a way that can be done systematically and allows us to make progress, because, as you say, otherwise another hundred years, it'll be beyond our lifetime before we get to it.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 17:31

Yeah, yeah, and maybe to add something to that, when we were going through the proposal I mean the standards development process and even review, because we had to review it before even we started off the development what we realized is that this standard, the way it's written, you can actually use it anywhere. And we realized that we can develop a continental standard versus waiting for every country to go and develop their own version of a standard and create a nightmare of an experience from anyone who's a technology owner or product owner coming into the market. So that's why, for us, this is just helping create an enabling environment for accessibility to thrive for many years to come.

Antonio Santos: 18:13

Another topic that I would like to bring to our discussion today is about employment. I would like to have your perspective about how the employment opportunities develop for people in particular case, in Kenya and in Africa in general, and how we can find ways for employers. Now we have the policies, government has awareness of the importance. How can we make sure that we are able to open opportunities for employment for people with disabilities?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 18:39

Sorry, can you repeat yourself one more time?

Antonio Santos: 18:42

How can we ensure that we can open opportunities of employment for people with disabilities? Sorry, can you repeat yourself one more time? How can we ensure that we can open opportunities of employment for people with disabilities?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 18:49

Yeah, so this is actually a very good question, because Africa in Africa there's a very Africa is the youngest continent in the world and we are going to get younger very soon, but there's also a very high unemployment rate among the youth. So how do we create employment? In my opinion, right now, every organization, every government should be focusing on how to create jobs, because if you're not creating jobs, you have all these skilled young people who have nowhere to go, who can't earn a living, who can't support their families then it becomes a recipe for disaster. But we have to focus on creating jobs and, in my own opinion, the accessibility space right now is untapped. We don't have accessibility specialists, we don't have accessibility designers, developers they don't exist. So that's a space that we can work collaboratively to create a huge population of young people, with and without disabilities, who can work as accessibility specialists or experts or anything like that.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 19:57

And this is important because digital products and services are being developed every day, on a daily basis, so definitely there's a need to have skilled or experienced young people working in the space so that we make sure we can definitely become whether it's part of the product lifecycle, so that we don't just come at the end. We come in from the design phase. So these are employment opportunities at every level of a product lifecycle where we can work collaboratively to make sure we create jobs. So I do believe there's a huge need for that, because the level of unemployment for those with disabilities in most countries in Africa is very, very high compared to those without disabilities. What you'll find is some countries like Kenya you find they give tax benefits and they require companies to have 5% of their employees without disabilities, but still the companies that do that are minuscule compared to what really needs to be done. So we still have a lot of work to do in that space.

Antonio Santos: 20:57

But do you feel that you have the resources and the tools in place to allow those individuals who want to learn to actually learn? Do you feel that it's possible, or is there something that you might need help and support from other entities to fill in that gap?

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 21:16

Yeah. So in terms of the young people who are ready to learn the youth who are ready to learn, there are tons of them. So in terms of numbers of people to be employed, that's not an issue, but in terms of skills development, that's a challenge. Because, from my experience, going through accessibility education is very important Understanding accessibility, whether it's as a designer, as a developer, as a tester or even users with disabilities, doing usability studies and everything else. But something that's also critical after you go through all this education and certification, is mentorship, because if you don't have the right mentorship, it doesn't matter how much reading you've done.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 21:59

The application is a whole different ballgame. So there's a need to collaboratively work together to really create an environment where young people can learn, but also they can gain experience. They can be handheld so that then, in two years or so, they can go and become the entrepreneurs that we are talking about. They can start their own accessibility businesses and thrive, or they can go and work for other bigger companies that are looking for accessibility teams to work for them. So I do feel there's a need to collaborate, and part of it also is when people are learning about accessibility. We want to make sure they learn the correct way. Accessibility is not a quick fix. Learning is not a quick fix. Learning is not a quick fix If the young people can be taught accessibility in the right way, the right methodologies, even testing. We all know about testing and all the horror stories we've had about testing. If we can teach them the right way and mentor them through the right journey, I think we will be in a good place.

Neil Milliken: 23:01

So I think it's a huge opportunity. But I agree that and building those programs to give people the skills and to nurture them as they go through that learning process and come into the world of work takes some time and effort. We did this in the UK through apprenticeships and we created the Digital Accessibility Specialist Apprenticeship Standards. With collaborating with other people in industry. Collaborating with other people in industry uh, you know, so we. This now is funded by the uk government and we're looking to try and do similar things elsewhere. Right, so it's open sourced and that can then start seeding the market, whether it's both like the the internal market within africa, or also the the overseas market, because you know there are, you know, tech companies that are servicing their europe and US clients from Africa. It's not just India that is engaged in outsourcing. So I think there's definitely opportunities.

Neil Milliken: 24:00

But even in the UK, where we're relatively mature on accessibility and have been doing stuff for a long time, there's still a real shortage of skills and organizations that are really sort of growing the talent. It's better than it was. I've seen a significant improvement over the last decade or so. Compared to the challenge that we have. The numbers of people are still pretty small and actually sometimes you don't necessarily have a first mover advantage. Fast followers actually sometimes do better. So maybe actually you have a chance in Kenya and other parts of Africa to see what we've done, learn from our mistakes and really start building up those skills, Because you're building new education programs and new tech companies and we're incumbent already. So we have structures, we have practices and we're asking people to change the practices they already have. Antonio, I know you had another question.

Antonio Santos: 25:00

No, I don't want this question to be kind of a cliche, but I think I really want your feedback and your views. Irene, we know that artificial intelligence is making a few headlines and we know that sometimes it's dominated by a few regions Other regions we don't get as much information or as much on the impact, but I would like to know your views about this topic and how impacting countries in Africa, nigeria in particular and how somehow also AI helps us to make accessibility better and improve the systems that we currently have. I could not miss this question.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 25:42

No, it's an interesting question because even at Inclusive Africa Conference, ai is one of the topics we really had to discuss, and we recognize it's something we need to pay attention to, because even if you're implementing all these disability or accessibility programs across the continent and you don't understand AI, then you're living in a different time. So the one thing we acknowledge is that AI literacy is very, very important across the board and, for us as we are committed to figuring out how can we provide AI literacy to young people with disabilities. Why do we say that? So that, as they get engaged in accessibility or disability programs, they already understand what is AI, what does it mean, how do you apply it? And if you're designing a new program, how do you design it with AI in mind? How do you apply? So that's something that we think is super, super critical in terms of Africa, but at the same time, we also acknowledge that the AI literacy training won't just show up. So that's why, for us as , we're going to figure out how do we train hundreds and hundreds of young people with disabilities on AI literacy. Another way we've seen AI being used very well in the continent is through development of assistive technologies, which is fantastic because there's some amazing solutions that young people in the continent are coming up with. Some of them are inspired by their own family members or their friends who can access information, and one of them is this young gentleman who's creating avatars for sign language.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 27:22

As you can imagine, sign language is very complicated in Africa, just like everywhere else in the world. Why? Because, like in Kenya, there's Kenyan sign language, but it doesn't mean Kenyans understand Kenyan sign language. Maybe they're very few. What happens is, depending with which tribe sometimes you come from, they have their own version of the sign language and it keeps getting, becoming a different version per country. So in a country there can be multiple versions. Now imagine that and think about across the continent and then think about the differences in languages, in dialects and all that stuff. So to be able to have even when we host sessions, it's very complicated.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 28:04

The number of sign language interpreters we have is unbelievable, because someone from Uganda might not understand Kenyan sign language. Some people don't even understand international sign language. So this innovation what I like about it it's an avatar that's trying to use data to really create sign language based on your country. So they started off with Kenya, I think now they're doing some work in Rwanda, and that's amazing because then I may be sitting in another. As you know, sign language interpreters the whole concept is really not scalable. As much as they're very important, it's not scalable. So if we can have innovations that can help the deaf and hard of hearing community be able to communicate or access information or anything like that, then such solutions are welcome, and this is an AI innovation. It's amazing, and my hope is that it can scale, scale, scale and maybe it's bought off at some point, and where it can help masses and masses of people. So it's nice to see the sort of innovations that young people are coming with that are really AI-based.

Neil Milliken: 29:08

No, I think that we certainly can't ignore AI and even where some of these emerging technologies don't fully meet the needs right now, and sometimes the communities can be critical we've seen, like with captions, how, over a relatively short number of years, how the quality improves and suddenly something that was considered, you know, beyond the pale and unacceptable it becomes ubiquitous. So I think we can't ignore it. We also can't ignore that the clock has ticked over. We've reached the end of our allotted time. So thank you so much for joining us today. I need to thank our friends at Amazon and MyClearText for keeping us on air, keeping us captioned, and look forward to continuing this discussion on social media. Thank you, irene.

Irene Mbari-Kirica: 29:55

Thank you, thanks for having me.