Making the Digital World More Accessible - Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2024

Have you ever thought about digital accessibility through the eyes of someone with a disability? The number of times we are on our phones or a computer a day to google something, find the website of a local business, or search to current news and events in the world, is something we don’t even think twice about. We do so many things online now, digital technology is very much imbedded in our worlds.

Have you thought about how our digital world caters to maybe someone who has low vision, or motor impairments? Thursday the 16th of May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) . A day to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than one billion people with disabilities/impairments around the world. Are we creating environments that are disabling in the first place?

The GAAD foundation was launched in 2021 and aims to disrupt the culture of technology and digital product development to include accessibility as a core requirement. When referencing digital accessibility, we are talking about the ability of people with disabilities/impairments to independently consume or interact with digital applications and content.

Websites can fall down in many areas. The most common issues are:

• low contrast texts.

• missing image alt (alternative) text meaning an image does not have a text description.

• empty links, meaning links have no meaningful text included in them.

• missing form labels (when a form is being filled out a person knows what the form is asking for).

• empty buttons that do not have text describing the function of the button.

• missing document language which allows a person who uses screen readers to listen to the text on the screen being read out.

The most common things that affect a person’s interaction with technology are visual, hearing, motor and cognitive.

Visual - For those that are blind or have limited vision, alternative text descriptions for images is crucial, as well as the ability to use the key board instead of the mouse to navigate interactive elements on a page. It is also important that a website’s contrast and text size can be adjusted to suit a user’s needs.

Hearing - People who are dead or hard of hearing rely on videos having captions and visual indicators instead of audio cues.

Motor – Those who have motor impairments may need alternative keyboards, mouses, eye control technology to allow them to navigate on their devices.

Cognitive – People who have learn disabilities/impairments or brain impairments may rely on a webpage being uncluttered, a smooth navigation process and the use of plain language. Functions that change font styles to dyslexia friendly options, as well as adjusting the line height can help those with learning difficulties to better digest information.

There are so many great tools out there for organisations to use that allow a user to adjust elements of a website as they need. At Pathways to Care we use UserWay which gives our users a menu of accessibility features they can apply to our website pages.

Jamie Knight is a web developer, writer, speaker, mountain biker and autistic. He currently works at the BBC making their online tools usable to the whole audience. We encourage you to watch a presentation he did on cognitive accessibility in 2018. He is an excellent speaker, speaking to his line of thought that we shouldn’t put the blame on people for being different (because we all are), the focus should be placed back on to developers and their role in creating environments that aren’t disabling in the first place.

We must push for better digital design because it isn’t just good for those living with disability, it is good for everyone. We are all different, and depending on the day we are having, we all have different needs.