On Thursday 20th May 2021 it is the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access, inclusion and accessibility.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day graphic of brightly coloured nondescript line drawings of people.

Did you know that 1 billion people Worldwide have disabilities. Some common disabilities and impairments include visual, hearing, motor and cognitive. The goal of Global Accessibility Awareness Day is to shine a light on digital access and inclusion for people with disabilities.

Every user deserves a first-rate digital experience on the web. Someone with a disability must be able to experience web-based services, content and other digital products with the same successful outcome as those without disabilities. 

Source: https://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/

Alongside our ongoing ‘Build Accessible’ campaign, we are excited to to support GAAD and we will also be taking part in the Global ‘Fix Your Content Day 2021 – Blackboard Ally’. 

Fix Your Content Day Graphic.

This 24-hour competition (taking place on Thursday 20th May 2021) is committed to creating accessible and more inclusive digital learning content across institutions globally. The objective of the day is simple, make as many ‘fixes’ as possible to your Blackboard course files through using Blackboard Ally. During the day Blackboard will track the activity of participating Universities and award a champion at the end of the day!

It would be great if lots of staff could engage with this competition, even just making a couple of fixes to your files would help push our accessibility score up and get Edge Hill on the leader board.

To support staff with accessibility and GAAD why not attend our ‘Build Accessible’ drop-in session taking place on the day? Learn top tips on how to make your content more accessible and get support with any accessibility queries. Further details about the drop-in session can be found on the Getting Digital Ready wiki page.

Resources

This short video (1:06) provides an overview of accessibility scores: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik_-ECvVWYs

For additional support with accessibility, visit our bespoke Accessibility wiki pages: https://go.edgehill.ac.uk/display/ls/Accessibility

Read our latest blog posts:

You can also tweet your accessibility good deeds throughout the day by using the hashtags #GAAD and #FixYourContentDay. Tag us @LTDatEHU

For more information or support please contact the LTD Team via email at [email protected]