Join me and many others around the world in celebrating the 13th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), which is celebrated annually the 3rd Thursday of May, which is May 16, 2024 this year. The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than one billion people with disabilities/impairments.
I hope you share educational opportunities all year and not just on Thursday, May 16, 2024, about how if you take some actions like I do and describe below you can also help to increase usability, accessibility and inclusion for digital technology.
- If you will be sharing any documents or communicating using Outlook, develop accessible Microsoft Outlook email messages, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF documents and perform the automated accessibility checkers that are built into Microsoft Office products, as well as Adobe Acrobat for PDF files. Plus use other automated tools such as color contrast checkers and involve people with disabilities in the required manual evaluations. Like all automated tools, these do not catch everything such as determining if an alternative text is descriptive enough or if it should be marked as decorative if it is not needed. Or making Excel files accessible for screen reader users to understand how the data in the cells relate to the headers and rows. Adding data tables needs to be done manually since it takes a person to understand where in the Excel file the data is and what row the column heading is at as described in the Excel link.
- Educate designers, developers and stakeholders to understand the benefits and how to design for inclusion and accessibility to help create an equitable experience for all. In addition, educate them on the importance of using automated as well as manual accessibility evaluation and resolving all usability/accessibility issues detected prior to the digital technology going into production. This is extremely important since the cost of remediating accessibility issues after they go into production is very expensive compared to catching them early and even worse may cause customer satisfaction issues or at times the issues may never get prioritized to be resolved.
- Coach designers, developers and stakeholders of software that it is necessary to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines although this is just a baseline for success. To ensure the user interface (UI) is intuitive, usable and users can use the software independently and efficiently the UI also needs to be usable. Therefore, performing manual usability evaluations is required.
- If you have the opportunity, partner with a Disability Network Business Resource Group to help them educate and promote accessible, intuitive and inclusive digital technology for all.
Let us all have an enjoyable time participating in the GAAD events going on and help us spread the word about the value of creating accessible, usable and inclusive digital technology.
How will you or did you celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day? If you were able to give a presentation or educate others what would seem to be the most educational? If you are new to Global Accessibility Awareness Day what did you find most valuable about the experience?
If you have any comments or feedback, I would appreciate it if you could please send an email to Bill Tipton since unfortunately the comments are closed to my blog site.
Bill Tipton
Contributing Author,
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdtipton
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.tipton.39
X - Formally Twitter: http://twitter.com/wdtipton