IA Labs Recap of 2023
2023 marked Inclusion and Accessibility Labs’ second year of business, and what an incredible year it was! Let’s take a look back at our growth and our highlights as a company in the last 12 months.
IA Labs made a huge splash at award shows this year. We were grateful to be nominated as finalists for Small Agency of the Year and Best Event Campaign at the Spider Awards, but we were especially delighted to see our CEO Kyran O’Mahoney win Digital Trailblazer of the Year at the National Digital Awards! At the Think Global Awards, the team brought home our first ever win in the Marketing category, shortly followed by the Diversity in Tech Awards, where we won for Disability Inclusion. IA Labs are determined to make an even bigger sweep in the 2024 awards season and prove how far we’ve come as a company since our launch.
In May, we participated in the release of the Northern Irish Digital Accessibility Index (DAI), a report commissioned by ForSight NI. The second edition of the Irish DAI also launched in November, with Minister for Trade Promotion, Digital and Company Regulation Dara Calleary as the guest of honour. Over one million people in Ireland are living with a disability, and both these groundbreaking reports showcase the difficulties they face everyday in accessing public-facing websites and technology. IA Labs hope to continue tracking Ireland and Northern Ireland’s progress towards full digital accessibility next year.
Technology conferences were the highlight of 2023 for our team! We travelled across the pond to attend and even speak at events in San Francisco, Atlanta, and New York, along with our parent company Vision Ireland. IA Labs also went far and wide across the country to Dublin and Belfast to talk about the importance of digital equality and incoming digital accessibility legislation. Our and Vision Ireland’s work on projects like myNCBI SmartHub was even mentioned by Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels and at the M-Enabling Summit as a viable use case for AI.
But one of our proudest achievements took place at the Dublin Tech Summit. In 2022, we were unable to reach the finalist round of the Vision X Pitch Competition, but this year IA Labs were thrilled to be awarded as the first place winners. We were also honoured to be invited to speak before the Oireachtas, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh Senedd about the growing need for digital accessibility and the barriers faced by people with disabilities in employment.
In our second year as a company, IA Labs had the amazing opportunity to spread our knowledge and raise awareness about our work in so many different places, and we can’t wait to see where 2024 brings us next! We remain committed to our mission of seeing the world become digitally accessible, and would like to say a huge thank you to all of the clients we have worked with this year, including Circle VHA, the National Library of Ireland, Dublin Bus, Bank of Ireland, Logitech, New Graphic, and more.
From the entire team at IA Labs, we would like to wish our blog readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Let’s make 2024 the year of accessible web content.
