Incidental Accessibility: How Mainstream Technology Is Expanding Accessibility in India

Most conversations about assistive technology start with devices built specifically for persons with disabilities. Assistive Technologies refer to products and services, such as wheelchairs, hearing aids, and digital products and services designed primarily to improve the lives of people with temporary or permanent functional difficulties. These tools, therefore, matter enormously, and for many people they are life-changing. However, because the market for specialised assistive technology is often perceived as relatively small, products designed exclusively for persons with disabilities can be expensive, difficult to scale and harder to access, particularly in a country like India. This creates an opening for mainstream technologies, which can sometimes offer accessibility benefits at a scale and cost that specialised products cannot.

Take the smartwatch, for example. Fall detection was added as a safety feature for hikers and people prone to everyday accidents. It is now used by older adults with balance disorders, people with mobility impairments, and individuals who live alone and want the assurance that help can be summoned automatically. Voice assistants, similarly, began as instruments of convenience, built around small efficiencies: turning off lights, setting reminders, skipping a track without leaving one’s seat. But their significance shifts entirely when seen through a different lens. For someone with a locomotor impairment, these same tools are not about marginal gains in efficiency; they reshape the terms of daily living. Tasks that once required assistance can now be performed independently, quietly restoring a measure of dignity and control. What was designed as a layer of ease has, in practice, become a means of autonomy. Noise-cancelling headphones were initially made for frequent flyers and open-plan offices. Many autistic users and people with sensory sensitivities now use them to manage environments that would otherwise be overwhelming.

However, policy often fails to acknowledge the empowering role such technologies play in the lives of persons with disabilities (PwDs). Most of these technologies continue to be treated as mainstream consumer products across regulatory and policy frameworks, including tax and certification regimes, even though, for many users, they function as assistive technology in every meaningful sense.

This report examines five categories of widely available technologies that are already playing that role: smart home devices, dictation software, AI-based smart glasses, haptic feedback and headphones. These were chosen for their strong accessibility use-case, covering diverse kinds of needs across disabilities. It maps the evolving policy landscape in which these technologies are developed, deployed and scaled, and further explores the tensions and debates shaping this ecosystem of mainstream technology with incidental accessibility benefits.

The report starts from the premise that access to technology for persons with disabilities is closely tied to independence, participation and dignity. It makes a simple argument: mainstream technology is already expanding accessibility, whether through accessibility features built into products or through uses that users have discovered themselves. The question, then, is how will India’s policy landscape evolve alongside these technologies to shape the markets that determine which innovations emerge, scale and become meaningfully empowering for persons with disabilities.