If You’ve Ever Closed a Survey That Wasn’t Built for You, Read This
If you’ve ever opened an online survey on behalf of an organization that should know better, only to discover the screen reader cannot navigate it, the questions assume you can see or hear, the CAPTCHA is image-only, and the form’s only “answer” mode is typing, you already understand the problem our newest sponsor exists to solve.
The company that solved it, the one that decided the fix had to start at the architecture level, rather than at a compliance checkbox, is Accessible Data Limited of London. As of Thursday, May 21, 2026, it is also the newest name on the Top Tech Tidbits Sponsor Wall.
Welcome, Jerry Nicholson. Welcome, Accessible Data. Let’s show readers what you’ve built.
The Respondent Decides, Not the Survey Author
The single biggest design idea inside Accessible Data’s flagship product, Accessible Surveys (https://accessiblesurveys.com), is that the respondent, not the person who built the survey, decides how each question is presented. The author writes the questions once. The respondent, on arrival, picks the format.
Per question, that means:
- Sign-language video in BSL, ASL, NZSL, and International Sign. The International Disability Alliance’s 2021 Second Global Survey on OPD Participation ran on the platform in 11 languages, including International Sign, French, English, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Swahili, Uzbek, Bengali, and German.
- Easy Read mode, with side illustrations, plain-language tooltips that define terminology on interaction, and 14- to 16-point defaults, designed and tested with self-advocates with intellectual disabilities, including (per the IDA’s 2022 global-survey report) seven self-advocates, four of them women.
- Text-to-speech read-aloud at speed and language the respondent chooses, not the author.
- Voice-note answers, for respondents who would rather speak than type.
- Adjustable text size, color, contrast, and theme. Logical tab order. Visible focus indicators. Strict keyboard navigation throughout.
- Save-and-return workflow plus low-bandwidth optimization, both documented in the IDA implementation.
- Multilingual aggregation, responses captured in different languages flow into a single dataset for analysis.
Translation: the survey adapts to the person taking it, instead of asking the person to adapt to the survey.
The conformance bar is consistent with that philosophy. Most survey tools target WCAG 2.x AA as a compliance checkbox. Accessible Data targets WCAG 2 AAA, a level above. In September 2025, the company announced a partnership with the Blind Institute of Technology, funded initially by a Disability Innovation Fund grant, for the first publicly announced independent WCAG 2.2 AA audit of the respondent interface.
Nothing About Us, Without Us, in Code
That phrase is the disability community’s. Most companies have not earned the right to say it.
Accessible Data has, and the receipts are documented. The product was co-designed alongside the International Disability Alliance beginning in 2020. The IDA’s 2022 global-survey report is on the public record, including five levels of accessibility testing, the EasyRead version designed and tested with self-advocates, and feature decisions driven by the lived experience of OPD members rather than by the priorities of an external product manager.
That is co-design at the design level, not the QA level. From my vantage point as publisher, that is the difference between accessibility as a product attribute and accessibility as a checkbox, and it is the kind of difference Top Tech Tidbits exists to surface, because most readers will never see the months of EasyRead workshops sitting behind a finished tool, and they deserve to know which tools have done the work.
The Customer List Tells You Everything
When the people who legally have to collect disability-disaggregated data well pick a tool, the tool has earned trust the hard way. Accessible Data’s customer list reads like a who’s-who of organizations under exactly that obligation:
- The International Disability Alliance, the foundational co-design partner, operating its own white-label instance, iData, at https://idata.tools. The IDA’s 2021 Second Global Survey ran on the platform and lifted responses 135% year-over-year, from 573 to 1,341. Respondents with intellectual disabilities rose from 1.4% in 2018 to 11.9% in 2021, that is what better access produces.
- UNICEF Innocenti, its 2025 Disability Research Prioritization Exercise reached more than 350 stakeholders, drew 170 Phase I responses, coded 477 suggested research topics into 595 distinct comments, and ran a 97-respondent Phase II, in International Sign, Easy Read, read-aloud, large text, configurable contrast, and three additional languages: Arabic, French, and Spanish.
- The United Nations, the 2025 evaluation of the UN Disability Inclusion Strategy (UNDIS) explicitly named Accessible Surveys as the “survey platform of choice.” That is a UN-system-wide statement, not a vendor-page claim.
- The New Zealand Ministry of Transport, its 2026 Total Mobility scheme public consultation, in standard, NZSL, Easy Read, and voice-recording variants, all running side by side.
- The Inter-American Development Bank, disability-policy research, with an official IDB report directing readers to a survey hosted on accessiblesurveys.com.
It is also worth noting what is not on this list: a TechCrunch profile, a Sifted writeup, a Reuters scoop. Accessible Data has built its credibility inside the institutions that use it, and inside the standard-setting bodies, including the UN Inter-Secretariat Working Group on Household Surveys, where Jerry is a named contributor to the 2024 Guidelines to Make Surveys More Accessible. That is the methodology community that shapes how national statistical offices conduct household surveys. The work has been done where it matters most.
From Bangladesh Impact Investing to UN-Trusted Disability Data, the Through-Line Is the Same
Jerry Nicholson is a Scottish-qualified Chartered Accountant, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, qualified January 2000, with a Master of Arts in Geography from the University of Edinburgh and a school career at The Leys School in Cambridge before that. The legal vehicle behind Accessible Data was incorporated in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2016 (originally as Preignition Limited) and formally renamed Accessible Data Limited on November 13, 2024.
Before the pivot to accessibility tech, Jerry spent roughly a decade running an impact-investment vehicle and rural-entrepreneurship accelerator out of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tindercapital (since 2006, with his wife Fiona) and the OPEN Accelerator (co-founded January 2013, with DRIK, Team Engine, and Venture Investment Partners Bangladesh). Tindercapital’s first investee was Oasis Coffins, an eco-friendly manufacturing turnaround that Jerry personally rewrote the business plan and reconstructed the balance sheet for to secure institutional backing.
The through-line from Bangladesh impact investing to UN-trusted disability data is straightforward, and Jerry says it plainly in nearly every public appearance: the people most often left out of decisions are the people whose participation makes those decisions actually work.
He builds the company alongside co-founder and CTO Christophe Geiser, a Swiss engineer based in Lyon, France, whose open-source web-component libraries (LitElement, Firebase, D3.js) form the technical spine of every Accessible Surveys deployment, including iData. Both founders are Persons with Significant Control on the UK Companies House register, each holding more than 25% but not more than 50% of the company’s shares and voting rights, a clean, two-PSC governance structure with no controlling investor.
How Jerry Got Here
Our story begins on August 8, 2025, when Dr. Kirk Adams looped me in on a partnership he and Jerry were signing between Innovative Impact and Accessible Data, and asked Mind Vault Solutions to handle the publicity. Jerry and I exchanged our first direct emails three days later, on August 11, 2025. The Innovative Impact / Accessible Surveys partnership announcement ran across the AT-Newswire and PWD Media Distribution Co-op channels on September 1, 2025.
That partnership stayed on my radar through the fall and winter, and on February 18, 2026, Dr. Adams returned with a recommendation: Jerry’s work, he said, deserved a place on the Top Tech Tidbits Sponsor Wall. After a sequence of scheduling exchanges, including the kind of London-to-Cleveland time-zone math anyone running a global team will recognize, Jerry and I sat down on April 14, 2026, for an hour-long conference call to talk in earnest. We spent that hour on what Accessible Data builds, who it serves, and why we both think Top Tech Tidbits readers in particular should know about it.
Onboarding is underway and Accessible Data’s sponsorship of Top Tech Tidbits formally begins on Monday, May 21, 2026.
If a Survey Isn’t Accessible, the Data Is Incomplete, and the Decisions Built on It Are Too
That is Jerry’s thesis, and it deserves a moment of attention from our community.
When surveys exclude disabled respondents, the resulting data excludes disabled people from the decisions those surveys inform, which programs get funded, which products get built, where transit goes, how schools are designed, who is hired and how. The downstream cost of inaccessible data collection is borne disproportionately by the same 1.3 billion people the data was supposed to represent.
Many of you reading this will be on the respondent side of an Accessible Surveys deployment in the months ahead, UN agencies, ministries, foundations, and disability organizations are increasingly switching to it. Many of you are also professionals who commission research; this is a tool you can deploy yourselves, on tiered annual pricing that scales from a single-survey Starter plan all the way up to bespoke white-label deployments on your own domain.
The three-part test I’d offer, and the one Jerry’s work passes cleanly, is this. Will the survey serve the respondent? Will the data serve the decision? Will the decision serve the people it is about? When the answer is yes across all three, the survey was worth running. When it is no on any of the three, somebody’s voice was left out, and someone, downstream, will pay for that.
Sponsors Like Jerry Are Why This Newsletter Reaches You For Free Each Week
On Monday, May 21, 2026, Jerry and his team join the Top Tech Tidbits Sponsorship family, and with that comes membership in the PWD Media Distribution Co-op, which means you’ll see Accessible Data’s posts circulating across our 42 (currently) connected channels reaching 189,000+ BLV/PWD-specific readers per post, multiplying the company’s voice inside our community in a way no other sponsor surface can.
Top Tech Tidbits remains free to read for more than 46,000 readers each Thursday because sponsors like Jerry Nicholson choose to fund that reach. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you to Accessible Data. Thank you to every sponsor on the Wall. And thank you to every reader who has shown up, week after week. None of this matters without you.
Where to Go from Here
- The platform, pricing, and documentation: https://accessiblesurveys.com
- The IDA’s live white-label instance, which you can explore now: https://idata.tools
- A direct line to the CEO: jerry@accessiblesurveys.com 📧️
Welcome to the family.
” The greatest barrier to accessibility is indifference. “
Aaron Di Blasi, PMP
Engineer, Educator, Advocate, Publisher and Journalist, President & Sr. PMP, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., PR Director: AT-Newswire, Publisher: AI-Weekly, Top Tech Tidbits, Access Information News, Title II Today
Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.
President, Sr. Project Management Professional (2006 — Present)
Innovative ideas. Solutions that perform.
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