Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

This year Global Accessibility Awareness Day will mark its 12th annual celebration on May 18, also known as GAAD, that works to promote digital accessibility, access, and inclusion worldwide. GAAD defines digital accessibility as the need all internet users, regardless of an individual’s disabilities.

A few facts

  • Globally over 1 billion people with disabilities are deprived of today’s digital products. 
  • According to the Web AIM report of 2021, 98.1% webpages at least have one WCAG2.0 error and 60.9 % of errors per home page due to the failure of low contrast, missing alt texts, empty links, missing form input labels, empty buttons, missing documents language and so on. 
  • Digital accessibility does not only benefit people with visual impairment, but it also includes guidelines for people with hearing, mobility, and cognitive disabilities. 
  • Automated accessibility testing is not enough. Even the best-automated tests can only catch about 25% of accessibility issues. 
  • Braille is important for digital accessibility; users can use Braille display to read and navigate the web. 
  • Google is the world’s most popular accessible website, and its home page is a search bar and a button.  
  • Popular smartphones come with robust screen readers, built-in features in Apple Voice-Over and Android Talkback. 
  • Voice assistants, like Siri, are common in mainstream devices but are also essential for some people with disabilities. 
  • Anything that is digital and available to the public, even PDF documents, needs to be accessible. 
  • Hashtags can be more accessible by capitalizing the first letter of each word, for example: #DigitalAccessibility. 

Would you like to make your digital environment more accessible? 

Learn good practices for Creating Accessible Content Internal with Outlook, Word and PowerPoint using Microsoft 365. As per your availability, enroll for the registration dates listed in Saba: 

For more information, questions, or to submit a request please contact us by email at Awareness Team.  

You may read more on Microsoft website be informed about Creating an Accessible World.