This year marks the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). To celebrate, we’ve put together a list of tips and helpful resources aimed at helping to start discussions about accessibility.
What is Global Accessibility Awareness Day?
The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion. More than one billion people with disabilities or impairments, so creating accessible information is more important than ever.
We really do understand that not everyone thinks about accessibility. Perhaps you’d like to start doing more, but you feel you’re facing an uphill battle? We hear you.
So, to help you get started, here are a few common scenarios and our advise on how to move forward. You’re doing a great thing, you’ve got this!
I don’t know where to start
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is a great place to start. WAI develops strategies, standards, resources to make the web accessible.
Check out their resources which include an overview video and a free online course on digital accessibility foundations. Visit the WAI’s accessibility fundamentals resources.
Nobody else in my organisation seems to care about accessibility
We understand and this can be incredibly frustrating.
Some things you could try are:
- host a team meeting – use this blog post and Global Accessibility Awareness Day as a reason to start a conversation about accessibility. What do your colleagues think about the term, what does it mean to them? Perhaps you could volunteer to take the WAI’s course (mentioned earlier in this post), and say you’ll report back at the next meeting.
- look at what others are doing – take a look at other organisations which are similar to yours. Is their online presence more accessible? Are you potentially letting down your audience by not doing the same?
- what’s in the news – accessibility is important to everyone and often will be in the news. For example, ‘remember when some websites went greyscale during the UK’s period of mourning?’ Or, you could start a conversation with – ‘have you seen Spotify has started adding transcripts to all their podcasts’. Trust us, just search ‘accessibility’ in your search engine and head to the ‘news’ results. Choose the story you think is the most interesting conversation starter, and just like that, you’ve started your organisation thinking about accessibility.
I don’t have time or resources
This is, of course, a really fair point. However, even small changes can make a big difference. For example, most organisations produce documents in Microsoft Word. Could you (and your team if applicable) commit to using the accessibility checker every time you create a new document? It only takes minutes to run the check and Word will tell you how to make improvements. You can read more about running accessibility checks in Word.
Bring it home
At the end of the day, more than one billion people in the world have a disability or impairment. In the UK, more than one in five people have some form of disability.
Making your information accessible isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s the only thing to do. Not to mention, it’s also the law for public organisations. For all others, it’s still equally important and helps you to stay relevant in an ever-changing digital world.
Have you found this advice useful? Have you got any tips you’ve found successful and would like to share? Leave us a comment and let us know. Go on, we’d genuinely really like you to.
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