VK Secrets of Digital Accessibility Online Platform

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2025: Launch of Digital Product Adaptation Courses for People with Perceptual Traits

VK has opened for everyone an internal system of courses on adapting digital products for people with perceptions. The company announced this on March 6, 2025.

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Фото: VK

The program was based on VK's research and practical activities in this area - for several years the team studied how users with impaired motor functions and hearing, blind and visually impaired people interact with interfaces.

The platform has collected more than 30 video tutorials and 20 practical materials covering various aspects of accessibility: from the intricacies of working with texts for blind users to conducting research with respondents with hearing impairment. Training video courses are useful for IT professionals who develop accessibility in digital products: developers, product managers, designers, researchers, testers.

Among the experts of the program are representatives of the products of the VK holding, which introduce functions for people with perceptual characteristics. For example, using a screen reader in Odnoklassniki and VKontakte, you can read the news feed, put reactions, exchange messages, comment on publications, in VK Calls there is voice acting of the interface and automatic subtitles in real time, in the Mail application, you can perform more than 50 actions, such as registration, creating a mailbox, writing a letter, restoring a password, VK Video allows you to automatically subtitle the uploaded video, and in RuStore you can execute all important store scenarios: download, buy, update applications and leave reviews.

Initially, when creating the course, we planned to organize the exchange of knowledge within the holding so that VK products become more accessible to the maximum number of people. But they realized that VK's experience in creating inclusive services could be useful outside the company. The more Internet resources will take into account the perceptions of all users, the more inclusive the digital environment as a whole will be, "said Oksana Fetisova, director of training and development at VK.