December 2025: IGF-DCAD co-organiser Judith Hellerstein represented the Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability at the WSIS+20 High-Level Meeting at the United Nations in NYC, including a side event ‘IGF Dynamic Coalitions at the Forefront of WSIS+20 and Beyond WSIS+20‘ . Her remarks at that session are below.
Hi, this is Judith Hellerstein, and today I will be speaking as one of the two coordinators of the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability, otherwise known as DCAD. The position of DCAD is that despite many of these last 20 years of advocacy, the digital divide among persons with disabilities is only mentioned tangentially throughout the WSIS+20.
If WSIS+20 is to actually fulfill its premise of being a people-centered, inclusive, and development-oriented information society, disability inclusion must move from the footnotes to the main agenda. What I mean is, persons with disabilities are one of the largest minorities. But unfortunately, when it comes to their participation in IGF events and other Internet governance discussions, their number is extremely small.
What does this mean? It means that in the 20 years of IGF discussions, although every IGF has had sessions and discussions on persons with disabilities, few persons with actual lived disabilities have actually participated in these discussions, and even fewer actually come in person.
DCAD has been working to change this. Our Disability Fellows Program, made possible through our generous donations by Google and Vint Cerf, allows us to bring persons with disabilities to the IGF. We also provide them with mentors and leadership training and other courses on Internet governance. In this way, we are providing an on-ramp for persons with disabilities to meaningfully participate in the IGF and to bring their knowledge and training back to their own communities.
Our hope is that these experiences will then enable these leaders to become leaders in their own communities, to join within their country’s multistakeholder advisory groups, and also be chosen on one of any of the additional multistakeholder advisory boards like the UN, the ITU, and other state-sponsored groups are setting up.
It is wonderful that many of the versions of the outcome documents and resolutions and other statements are mentioning the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the desire for all things to be accessible. But we need also to ensure the implementation or requirements of accessibility standards and guidelines on the adoption and enforcement of the international accessibility standards, most notably like the World Wide Web Accessibility Initiative.
So I pose this other question. Are we building the capacities in the right manner? Is there something else we can do? One way we can move this forward is to ensure that all the leadership groups within the Internet governance space contain persons with lived disabilities.
We also need to change the mindset, not just of people coming to the Internet governance events, but also of the organizers of these events so that they will have accessible meetings. We need to increase the awareness of everyone involved in creating and producing knowledge in a way that is made accessible for persons to access the knowledge when they access it in a different manner.
We should commit to ensuring that any and all interventions and capacity building and training are made to bring to the forefront local content and languages that are made accessible, inclusive, and responsive to the needs of persons with disabilities. And they also adhere to accessibility standards and assistive technology compatibility.
For the past 20 years, we have built a digital world that has systemically excluded 1.5 billion people. The digital divide is not only about rural connectivity or 4G access. It is about the millions of uncaptioned videos, unnavigable websites, inaccessible apps, and inaccessible documents that define the online experience for users.
One example is sometimes staff in all their meaningful way want to make documents prettier, so they hire a design firm, but then inadvertently forget to tell the design firm that we need it to be accessible. And so sometimes documents that will have been accessible become no longer accessible because the graphics and the images are not using appropriate alt text or descriptions.
So we need to keep raising the awareness of all staff and participants at IGF events and how to create these documents, how to create accessible meetings. In that vein, DCAD in 2024 significantly revised the IGF Accessibility Guidelines, and then we updated them last year. We also have published these guidelines in different languages. So we have them in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and we hope to add a few more languages shortly.
Each year we also update the guidelines based on experiences that our members and other DCAD fellows have at the conferences, so it can make these guidelines more dynamic, and then it goes a long way to showing how we make further improvements.
DCAD also joined other intersessional groups within the IGF, such as the different policy networks, Best Practice Forums, and the NRIs to educate these groups and others on the importance of integrating persons with disabilities into leadership and ensuring that all programs are accessible and inclusive to all.
However, in the end, it comes down to these questions that these knowledge producers need to ask themselves. Is the knowledge groups are imparting to the members accessible for persons with disabilities or not? If the knowledge is not accessible, then why not? What can be done to change this? What are we doing to ensure that efforts are being made to co-design and co-deliver digital capacity building and leadership development programs for persons with disabilities? Ensuring that their lived experience informs policymaking and also informs other areas such as AI, cybersecurity, data governance.
The WSIS+20 review presents a historic opportunity to move beyond tokenism and to enshrine digital accessibility at the heart of a truly inclusive information society. Without explicit commitments and concrete access for persons with disabilities, and without the active leadership of people with lived experience with disabilities, the vision of universal, meaningful, and affordable access cannot be realized.
As one of the coordinators of the IGF DCAD, I urge all stakeholders to ensure that accessibility and the inclusion of people with disabilities are not afterthoughts, but core priorities reflected throughout the WSIS+20 outcome documents and in the future mandate of the IGF. Only by doing so can we build a truly multistakeholder inclusive governance model that serves the needs of all people and sets a precedent for equitable global digital policymaking. Thank you so much.