Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), when the world is invited to get everyone “talking, thinking and learning” about digital access and inclusion.
Once you know that GAAD is all about the more than 1 billion people who are living with some form of disability or impairment, you will see why. The idea of the Day is to shine a light on all those last remaining obstacles to full digital access and inclusion for people with disabilities.
And as the organisers say, “Every user deserves a first-rate digital experience on the web— [and so] someone with a disability must be able to experience web-based services, content and other digital products with the same successful outcome as those without disabilities.” We couldn’t agree more, and are sure you do, too.
If you had a chance to participate in an event to mark it—well done! But you still have time today to do something like the organisers suggest to show your support, like:
- caption a video—and if it wasn’t something created by you or your company, maybe send the transcript to the owner and suggest that they follow the information provided by Google for YouTube or 3Play Media for Vimeo to add captions?
- write a blog post on what digital accessibility awareness is, and what your ideas are for raising that awareness
- create a video demonstrating how you use some type of assistive technology, and uploaded it to YouTube
- download this useful tool and run it over a website you have developed and see how accessible these are to your visitors, including those with different disabilities. Even better, take the results and implement the suggested changes!
And if you really are so stacked that you can’t do anything today, can you please at least show some social media love by following the Day on Twitter (@gbla11yday and @globalaccessibilityawarenessday, with the hashtag #gaad) and/or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/globalaccessibilityawarenessday).
We’re all very busy right now coming out of Lockdown, so you probably didn’t. But the Day is very important to both UKAAF and everyone who supports digital accessibility, and if you do have some capacity to take some practical action along these lines, we’d really encourage you to.
After all, you hardly need reminding that we still all have a long way to go here: according to the WebAIM Million Report quoted on the GAAD home page, a shocking 98.1% of home pages have at least one WCAG 2.0 failure, with an average number of 60.9 errors per home page.
If we can all in the UKAAF family do one positive thing on this @globalaccessibilityawarenessday… who knows how soon we can reverse these figures for good?
Carina Birt, UKAAF PRO and Board Member
