Celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day
People of Earth. My name is Chris Knapp, and I am blind. By proclamation, on this 21st day of May, I am hereby making you all aware that I would really, really like our world to be accessible.
Great, so we’re all on the same page now. I’m glad I got that off my chest, I feel so much better.
Wait, you mean there’s more to Global Accessibility Awareness Day than just that? Yeah, seemed a little too easy. I guess that makes sense.
About Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is an annual celebration observed on the third Thursday of May each year. GAAD focuses on digital access and inclusion for more than one billion people worldwide with disabilities and/or impairments.
The first GAAD event was observed in May 2012 and was inspired by a blog post by Los Angeles-based web developer Joe Devon. Devon worked with Jennison Asuncion, an accessibility professional from Toronto, to co-found GAAD.
According to its website, "The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) access/inclusion and people with different disabilities."
Past GAAD celebrations have featured a variety of virtual and local events hosted in nearly 20 countries across six continents. Needless to say, in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, all of us will be celebrating this year’s event virtually from the safety of our own homes with high-speed internet connection and web cams. Already, there have been a number of informative webinars and virtual events during the week leading up to GAAD, but even if you missed out on all of this great content, you can still access many of these recorded sessions. There is also still time to register for other events like the 2020 Virtual Abilities Summit to be held next week on May 27-28.
The Coming Together of Worlds
Of course, as someone with a disability who utilizes assistive technology and is also an accessibility consultant, I think these sorts of events are great for helping bring awareness to this important topic. There is so much value in bringing together these two groups, individuals with disabilities who have to use assistive technology to access the web and other digital content and those developers, designers, engineers and others who are committed to creating technology solutions that take into consideration the accessibility needs of individuals with disabilities.
Just in the relatively short time that I have been working as an accessibility consultant, I have found the collision of these two worlds to be both informative and eye opening (pun intended). I remember the first time I came across the term A11Y, which is a common way developers like to abbreviate accessibility. I was like, “What the hell does this mean?”, which was pretty funny when I had to turn around and ask one of my developer friends to explain this commonly used accessibility term to someone who has used assistive technology for most of their adult life. This same developer contracted with Accessiversity Labs a while later to do some “live” manual testing on a website that they were redesigning for one of their education clients. After the project was completed, he sent me an auto-generated message through the bookkeeping software they were using, requesting that I submit a copy of my company’s W-9 form. When I had to follow-up with him a short while later, and tell him that he wasn’t going to believe it, but this colossal software company’s web form wasn’t accessible with my screen reader software, he sent me the following reply:
“When I use a complicated website I'm terrified that I'll accidentally click something or process something prematurely or (expletive) it up. I build websites, and can see! Can't imagine what it's like having to just test click and guess going through things.” He went on to ask, “Do you randomly get messages like – ‘Thanks Chris you have been mailed an invoice for your lifetime subscription of (XYZ Product) at the discounted rate of $2,500’, just random (expletive) you never even wanted or knew was on the page?”
While it seems like a no-brainer that assistive technology users and accessibility practitioners (and the broader developer/designer community) should be natural collaboration partners, these illustrations just go to show how far apart these two worlds can be, even though they essentially revolve on the same axis. It also goes to show why events like GAAD are so important for building awareness about accessibility issues, and why accessibility/usability testing services like those offered through Accessiversity Labs can help to bridge this user/practitioner awareness and understanding gap.
There is a Web Accessibility 101 training that I often like to do for developer teams/development shops, where I use this guinea pig metaphor to describe Accessiversity Labs’ unique value proposition. Basically, it says that when it comes to accessibility and usability, we are all guinea pigs, and we should embrace that role. Every project is an experiment, every issue is an opportunity to learn and improve on what we have done before.
Make 2020 Be the Year of Accessibility
While assistive technology users and accessibility practitioners are near-and-dear to my heart, there is also a third, maybe more important group that needs to be part of the conversation being facilitated through events like GAAD. That group is everyone else on the planet who still isn't paying attention to digital accessibility, despite all of the changes over the last couple of months that have been going on right before our collective eyes.
Back in March, when the global economy put the metaphorical “gone fishing” sign up in its storefront window, we didn’t realize it at the time, but our world was about to change forever. That’s not to say that the current COVID-19 pandemic won’t eventually subside. It will. It’s not as if we won’t start to return to some semblance of normalcy. We will. No, the change that I am referring to is the fundamentally different way we will approach work moving forward. Specifically, the new and different ways we will leverage technology as we continue to bump our way through, and will eventually emerge from this pandemic.
I think one good thing that will likely come from this pandemic, is that it will force a lot of organizations to rethink how they do things. And although it might be painful in the short-term, looking at ways to better integrate technology solutions into their everyday operations could set these businesses up to be more agile and efficient over the long haul. While in recent years there have been plenty of examples of certain industries and workers slowly transitioning over to telework type arrangements, in terms of broad adoption and acceptance of remote, work-from-home employment, the COVID-19 crisis demonstrated what could be possible on a scope and scale not yet imagined.
Like the old proverb, “necessity is the mother of invention”, the current health crisis has presented us with both challenges and opportunities. But as everyone prepares to jump on the virtual bandwagon to leave stuffy corporate conference rooms and office cubicle farms choking in the dust, please just pause long enough to think about all of those people out there who have been begging for this kind of change for years. Not because they have been dying to work from their kitchen tables, but because the type of technology we are talking about has the potential to level the playing field for individuals with disabilities and create opportunities that had previously not been available to them.
Like I said, it has the potential to do all of this. That is, if it is done right.
For someone who uses assistive technology, adapting to all of these sudden changes can quickly turn into a Herculean task. For example, if you think it took you some getting used to using Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, try relying on screen reader software to figure out how to install and enable the web conferencing solution on your computer. And even after you get it up and running, you still have to figure out how to get it to effectively integrate with your assistive technology so the other meeting participants aren’t having to listen to your screen reader talk in the background, and you’re not sitting there like an idiot with your face half way out of frame.
Just about every technology out there for promoting better workplace productivity has the potential of creating unintended issues from an accessibility standpoint. VPN clients, collaboration sites, screen capture and sharing in web conference presentations—all are powerful, potentially game-changing solutions for supporting a dispersed, virtual workforce. Many of these can be supported by assistive technology, but unfortunately, not all solutions are accessible, so it requires doing your homework and investing in tools that will work for everyone.
But since businesses are already investigating these sorts of solutions as they look to adapt to having a virtual workforce, why not go that extra mile? Why not use this COVID-19 pandemic and today’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day as the jumping off point for instituting long-term, systemic change? Why not make 2020 the year of accessibility?
And as you continue to adjust to this new reality, just remember all of the people out there who use assistive technology and have been dealing with these issues of accessibility well before the current crisis. They will continue to have to rely on these technologies and systems well after things start to return to normal, whatever “normal” looks like. The next time you can’t unmute the audio on your Zoom meeting, or you can’t figure out how to hand over the reigns of your webinar to Barry in accounting. The next time technology isn’t quite working for you, stop and think of all of us out there who use assistive technology. Better yet, close your eyes and think of us.
Welcome to our world.