May 19th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is a month away!  May 19th will mark the fifth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of GAAD is to get people talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility and users with different disabilities.  

While people are interested in the topic of making technology accessible and usable by persons with disabilities, the reality is that they often do not know how or where to start. Awareness comes first. Read the blog post by Jose Devon that inspired GAAD.

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Question: How will you promote GAAD with your program and students?

Mike Cruse

Disabilities in Adult Education

michaelcruse74@gmail.com

Comments

Hi Mike:

Thanks for the post.  Jose Devon's idea for May 19th is really powerful:  On this day, every web developer will be urged to test at least one page on their site in an accessibility tool. After fixing up the page, they are urged to blog about what they changed and inspire others to follow suit.

One of the activities that MN State Agencies did in 2015 was to provide opportunities to going mouseless for a day (unplug the mouse!) to get a fix on how well a website or document can be navigated using just the keyboard shortcuts (here is a set of common shortcuts for Windows).  And, since most of us create documents, it's helpful to know what goes into making documents more accessible

From one of my favorite websites on accessibility hits the nail on the head:  from University of Washington's DO-IT website

People with disabilities meet barriers of all types. However, technology is helping to lower many of these barriers. By using computing technology for tasks such as reading and writing documents, communicating with others, and searching for information on the Internet, students and employees with disabilities are capable of handling a wider range of activities independently. Still, people with disabilities face a variety of barriers to computer use. These barriers can be grouped into three functional categories: barriers to providing computer input, interpreting output, and reading supporting documentation.

Do you have students with disabilities who benefit/are challenged by computing technology? 

Cynthia

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3), which is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium), has a project called the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), an effort to improve the accessibility of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) for people with disabilities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Accessibility_Initiative). Although the site is intentended for web developers, much of the content is written in non-technical terms, which can be easily understood by non-developers. This information could be helpful to program managers who need to “talk from the same page” with someone they’ve hired to develop a website, evaluate the product, and to provide content themselves.

On W3’s “Tips for Getting Started with Web Accessibility” page (https://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/tips/), the “Designing for Web Accessibility” link duplicates and adds to information in links provided in earlier posts in this thread. The “Writing for Web Accessibility” link has some good guidance for those writing content for the developer to include on the site. The “Better Web Browsing Tips” link on the left (https://www.w3.org/WAI/users/browsing.html) has guidance on how to customize a computer to improve the browsing experience.