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Celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day

The Global Accessibility Awareness Day logo. GAAD in blue letters against a white background in side of a blue circle with a blue keyboard at the lower right.

On the third Thursday of May, we celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). GAAD "started" on Sunday, November 27, 2011, when Joe Devon penned a post on MySQLTalk.com challenging his fellow back-end programmers to increase their knowledge about accessibility. "Let’s work together and fix this oversight in our knowledge." See Joe Devon’s post here.

Then a completely random event occurred. An accessibility professional in Toronto, Jennison Asuncion, came across a tweet from Devon:

screen capture of the tweet sent to Joe Devon from Jennison Asuncion. It says: I plan to tweet re your blog post tomorrow, but wanted to let you know I'm all over your idea of Global Accessibility Day

 

And voila! The two men joined forces using their respective influence in the industry, and the first Global Accessibility Awareness Day was born.

 

Be Part of the Conversation

So, what can you do to help spread the word about accessibility? Try learning a new tool like VoiceOver or NVDA screen readers. Learn the Web Contact Accessibility Guidelines. Research and keep up on current legal cases around digital accessibility. Go "mouseless" for an hour and navigate your favorite website using only the keyboard. Post on your favorite social media outlet the importance of designing with accessibility in mind. Create an event, attend an event and conduct an automated accessibility scan with a tool like DubBot ... bet you’ll be surprised!

Above all, keep talking about it, keep thinking about it, keep learning about it, and keep creating digital access, opportunity and inclusion.

Here are some other ways to start spreading the word about accessibility:


Resources

Maggie Vaughan, CPACC
Content Marketing Practitioner
DubBot