We’re taking accessibility worldwide today! Get ready to have your world rocked, because today, May 15th Accessibility Partners is celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). As we navigate our streamers and balloons, here’s some background. GAAD is an international effort of disability and accessibility advocates with the overall goal of getting people talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility and users with disabilities.
For a day of this magnitude, we want to bring the awareness to everyone: a free overview of your website’s homepage for accessibility.
For the entirety of today, on May 15, we encourage individuals with any website, big or small, to tweet @Access_Partners, Facebook, or e-mail (Info@AccessibilityPartners.com) us your URL and we will audit the homepage at absolutely no charge. Following our review, we will supply a high-level, overview report with any areas that might not be accessible to a user with disabilities. Please note that depending on scheduling and availability, this report might not be available immediately after May 15, but will be issued promptly to retain its timeliness. Sharon Rosenblatt, a member of the web testing team is beyond excited. She says, “This is a tremendous opportunity to bring accessibility in areas where it isn’t even considered. We’re hoping organizations in all sorts of industries reach out to us for this offer, and want to get the dialogue rolling!”
Our document will include tips on how to fix those to promote web content that all can access. The goal of this offer is to stimulate discussion on the topic of web accessibility. The Internet fosters information exchange in both personal and professional spheres, and nobody should get left out of that experience. Too often, people do. Accessibility Partners wants to banish this.
Principal Partner Dana Marlowe is thrilled to participate in this global discourse. “We’re hoping to foster a knowledge transfer between those who never considered accessibility, or those who only think of it as a requirement for a contract. I want to get the ball rolling and have people realize that accessibility influences everyone and everything, and that it is relatively easy to implement. GAAD gives us the opportunity to share our expertise and passion, and with an international platform, we can all make the web a more accessible place”.
According to the creators of GAAD, the target audience is the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use. While people may be 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.
We’ll point you in the right direction.