Everybody interested in Accessibility has heard about Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), I am sure of it. But it is not enough.
My thoughts on GAAD
Main point of this day for me is to spread the awareness on accessibility to other people that are not so interested in accessibility or maybe just treat it as another technical necessity that we have to have because the law said it.
I was lucky to start with accessibility awareness inside our company – for about one and a half year ago I presented the technical details to my co-workers (CEO, sales, POs, designers, back-end and front-end developers) and got some positive feedbacks that I was grateful for.
We even improved as a company a bit – thinking more about how to design and make things more accessible, pro-actively, and I managed to do some evaluation for the project I was working on as a front-end developer.
But I’ve noticed that in the start of a company’s journey towards accessibility – we have to work more on awareness. Because it is unfortunately very easy to forget about it when you have a short deadline with a lot of features to implement and test and hungry continuous integration pipeline, that is waiting for your releases when you are testing the last things after a quality assurance session.
So it is very nice to have GAAD as a reminder to remind myself and others, yet again, about the need to integrate accessibility into whole business. Integrate it into our minds when estimating, designing, implementing, testing, demoing.
Accessibility must be integrated into business and not just into test procedures. Then it is easier to manage and easier to deliver.
me
It must also be a Definition of Done, as I like to put it. And when they are about to respond “ok, so a part of testing” – I am there to respond – “no, a part of the task itself”.
What did we do for the GAAD
I am happy that my management started to think about accessibility as a business advantage too. It is a good indication that we will all be more aware of it.
So I was honored to be a presenter for a one hour long “Introduction to accessibility webinar” for the public that we arranged in the spirit of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Webinar had more than 40 attendees (5 of them from our company, others were our customers and even some random people that found about it on our social media), which was quite a good number for few linked-in and Facebook posts.
According to the feedbacks and to the fact that almost all remained to the end I was pretty happy, but it still felt that we could do more for the awareness and I thought that I would like to present much more practical examples of the accessibility, so we will definitely make a more practical event soon.
Here are some links to the promotions, articles and other related online resources;
- Our company’s event page regarding the webinar (Norwegian, opens in new window),
- PowerPoint presentation with abundance of notes (Norwegian, opens in new window),
- My article about Universal Design (Useful for all, Unavoidable for some) on LinkedIn (Norwegian, opens in new window),
- We have also published the event on globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org under the name Universal Design Webinar – Useful for All, Unavoidable for Some (event in English, links to Norwegian page, opens in new window).
