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Navin Thadani won't ever forget the horrified looks on his engineers' faces.
It was 2016, and Thadani was a vice president of product development at Oracle. He and his team from Rovello, a recently acquired startup, had built a particularly neat piece of software--or so he thought. Someone from the tech giant's accessibility department said the new product was completely inaccessible for anyone with a vision disability. "Sure, no problem," Thadani replied, somewhat naively. "Forward me the requirements and I'll take a look at it."
The requirements, it turned out, presented a serious challenge, so Thadani called in his friend and co-worker Gal Moav, a senior director of product management. Then, they brought in the whole team, none of whom had ever written code to the stringent accessibility standards of a large corporation. "It's a very hard problem to solve," Thadani says. "Out of all the projects that we had to do around security, integration, and billing systems, accessibility was the one where I saw our engineers struggle the most."