About
Dr. Aashutosh K is an accessibility practitioner and something of a philosopher of the field, drawn to its unanswered questions and persistent about making the answers usable. His work began in 2019 on a project for the World Health Organization, and continued through the pandemic in India, designing for field professionals who worked outdoors and needed to understand a screen at a glance. That work exposed a gap: no mobile-specific accessibility guidelines existed, and the industry was assessing mobile apps against a standard written for the web. He began building his own design-stage tests instead. That became his first book, Mobile Accessibility Rituals, published after his move to Singapore, which led to his appointment as a W3C Invited Expert on the panel drafting WCAG for Mobile. In the same period he served as a co-chair of the accessibility committee at Grab, completed his CPACC certification, and turned to the economics of the field — work that produced the SUC Score framework and his Impact Sizer model. Back in India, his focus has shifted to older users: a large population who rarely identify as needing accessibility, do not meet the definition of disability, and are excluded daily regardless. He received an honorary doctorate in October 2025 and is currently building his own venture.
Talk details
Let's Crush the Ex(cus)es!
About this talk
Our users aren't disabled. There's no ROI. This'll slow us down. We'll do it later. Not my problem. Research puts each excuse in the mouths of more than half of us. This session dismantles all five using India's own numbers — 34.7 crore Indians over 60 by 2050, a silver economy worth USD 1.5 trillion, and a SEBI deadline five weeks away. You'll leave with two tools: the Impact Sizer and the SUC Score. And one uncomfortable idea: 34.7 crore isn't a market. It's a queue, and we're all in it.