Peri will work with the executive team to lead accessibility initiatives

UserWay, a digital accessibility company, announced the appointment of Raghavendra Satish Peri as Director of Accessibility. This role will provide organization-wide leadership in the area of disability awareness to help UserWay realize its mission of making the internet accessible for everyone.

Peri comes to UserWay with more than a decade of experience in the accessibility industry. His career includes having served on the accessibility team at IBM and being Senior Accessibility Consultant and Product Manager for Deque Systems.

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“It is truly an honor to have Raghavendra join our team in a leadership role,” Allon Mason, founder and UserWay CEO, said. “Not only is his personal story a testament to the power of what can be achieved when someone refuses to give up, but his incredible depth of technical and thought leadership expertise will be valuable assets for UserWay.”

Accessibility, namely digital accessibility, is profoundly important to Peri who started losing his eyesight at an early eight, but wasn’t diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa until he was 14 years old. By that time, doctors had already estimated that Peri was 85% blind. Overcoming the challenges of visual impairment in school and throughout his career energized Peri to become a digital accessibility evangelist.

Peri has spoken about digital accessibility at more than 80 conferences and events around the world, including the CSUN conference and TEDx talk at Youth Chennai. He has published numerous articles at DigitalA11Y.com and HelloA11y.com, two organizations in which Peri founded.

“I’ve always wanted to make a positive difference in the lives of people with disabilities,” Peri said. “UserWay is helping me make that possible on a global level.”

Peri has earned multiple certifications from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), including the Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA) designation, and holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Osmania University.

His appointment comes during a time of rapid growth at UserWay. Its accessibility widget has been installed on over 1 million websites around the world, revenue has increased by 400% annually over the past 12 months, and the company’s staff has tripled in size during the same period. The company also celebrated its IPO on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) in February with the stock price increasing by 50% on its first day of trading.

UserWay offers a complete suite of accessibility solutions and services, including Accessibility Scanning and Monitoring (an advanced scanning tool for developers); manual audits; statements of compliance; an empathy lab staffed with accessibility experts with various types and degrees of disabilities; and consulting and professional services. UserWay also offers a fully managed compliance service for enterprise and public sector clients with a $1 million guarantee.

The core product UserWay provides is an AI-powered accessibility solution that can be installed on websites with a single line of code. It helps organizations meet strict WCAG and ADA regulations for web accessibility and compliance in a fraction of the time and cost that it would take to remediate accessibility violations manually at the source-code level.

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Sites remediated by UserWay are made significantly more accessible for people with varying degrees of disabilities, including those who rely on screen readers and other assistive technologies. Since software developers are not required to achieve accessibility, UserWay is able to offer a rapid path to compliance with minimal investment of time and resources with a significantly faster time-to-market product.