When We Stop Treating Online Accessibility as an Afterthought, We’ll All Benefit
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
When we talk about accessibility with our clients, we use a parable of sorts. It’s the story of a New York City public library that opened in Queens in 2019, a $41.5 million building that was initially hailed as an architectural triumph. But within days of its soft opening, critics were singing a different tune. Angry social media posts started calling out what had somehow slipped through the cracks of the planning process: the building was incredibly inaccessible. Tiered book…
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
About this Series:
In the coming months, I’ll be sharing ten lists of ideas for things we need to do now to ensure that our digital future meets the challenges and possibilities that lie ahead. It’s not too late to fix the mistakes of the past and create a firm foundation for the years ahead, but our prosperity and well-being at every level of American society will depend on confronting these challenges and taking meaningful action.
Improve Equity of Access
Most of us have increasingly turned to online access when it comes to interacting with our government at all…
It’s time to reboot and upgrade our digital infrastructure
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
There’s almost nothing that we don’t transact online these days. We pay our bills, order our dinners, go on dates, file our taxes, and so much more. And we count on the fact that we can do it so efficiently and safely. It’s a false sense of security, particularly when it comes to digital government.
You wouldn’t drive across a crumbling bridge on the verge of collapse, hanging from frayed suspension wires just a jolt away from snapping. But you’re doing the digital…
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
Shaping our Digital Future Part I: Fund Digital Infrastructure
About this Series:
In the coming months, I’ll be sharing ten lists of ideas for things we need to do now to ensure that our digital future is as bright and booming as possible. It’s not too late to fix the mistakes of the past and create a firm foundation for the years ahead, but our prosperity and well-being at every level of American society will depend on confronting these challenges and taking meaningful action.
Fund Digital Infrastructure Our nation’s digital infrastructure is…
The Origins of Dysfunction in Online Government Services and the Road to a Cure
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
A couple of months ago, I gave a keynote address at Drupal GovCon 2020, a virtual gathering for developers and managers of government websites. In that address, I shared a shocking statistic derived from the data our company, Interpersonal Frequency, gathered from roughly 15 million government and municipal website users across the country. Nearly one out of three visitors to government websites fails to complete the purpose of their visit.
Not surprisingly, users’ failure rates went up even…
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
The tech giants say it all the time: The future is digital, and moreover, that future is now. If there were ever any doubt that the digital future has arrived, the Covid-19 pandemic has thoroughly erased it. Overnight, government services we used to stand in line or drive across town to access had to find ways to reach us right in our living rooms or on our mobile phones. …
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
COVID-19 has been devastating to people and to our economy. It has also put an unimaginable strain on our digital infrastructure. Our ability to monitor and track the disease and access real-time information about our communities is compromised because of a massive under-investment in digital infrastructure.
When a hurricane destroys a bridge to services and civilization, we fix it. And yet, we’ve done little to fix the out-dated systems we rely on from our local governments to provide services and to keep us informed.
Now is the time to invest in and to upgrade our country’s crumbling online infrastructure.
By Harish Rao, Founder & CEO Interpersonal Frequency
The digital infrastructure used by millions of people in this country to perform basic tasks is profoundly broken. COVID-19 has exposed just how vulnerable we are to old and antiquated systems and decades old coding. Slow, confusing, and inadequate digital infrastructure nationwide is hindering our ability to help people when they need it most.
Even before the pandemic, online offerings were unreliable and often led to virtual dead-ends. At the Federal level, veterans sometimes failed to receive benefits, while states and municipalities struggled to provide functional basic services like filing for food…
Interpersonal Frequency
I.F. empowers government orgs to be relevant, accountable, responsive, and engaging to communities through data-driven technology and award winning websites.
