Day of Universal Accessibility Awareness (GAAD) 2015

“Brother, today is a wonderful day for faith accessibility ; Brotherhood, today is p-red day for faith accessibility ; Brotherhood, today is the most pr-red-red-red-red day for faith accessibility »

[Dumas A. Countess de Monsoro]

Today is another Global Accessibility Awareness Day or simply GAAD. This is a relatively new tradition in the IT community, since this year GAAD is only the fifth time. Since 2011, this day was celebrated on May 15, but from 2015 it was decided to postpone it to the third Thursday of May, which this time fell to 21 numbers.

GAAD is dedicated to the popularization of accessibility in the IT industry, that is, accessibility of interfaces for users with disabilities. Historically, it all started with the availability of web-based interfaces, but now the day of awareness has spread to the whole sphere of digital accessibility, that is, the availability of all digital products.

Many designers, developers and, in principle, leaders of the information technology industry do not know what should be done to ensure the availability of their products, and indeed what problems and solutions exist in this area. On the other hand, digital accessibility specialists themselves are often not very actively promoting accessibility ideas and technologies. The main mission of Universal Accessibility Day is precisely to fix this situation.
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The GAAD website offers a number of ideas on how companies or independent developers can spend this day with benefits for global accessibility. This could be a post in a corporate blog, an internal technical seminar, or testing the availability of your product and studying the accessibility documentation in the interface technology used. However, any activity, one way or another contributing in the long run to improving the accessibility of information and communication technologies, would be entirely appropriate.

However, GAAD is only one day in the year when we talk about the importance of accessibility, while all the remaining days need to be confirmed with real deeds. Only then will it all make sense.

If you do not care who uses your products and how, then today is the most suitable day to think about how to make them even more accessible!