Last year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) was tenth in a row and only second one for me. So I missed eight of them, yes, but still better late than never. This just means that the awareness took time to reach me, I guess.
It was mostly because of me starting to follow people in the accessibility field that I stumbled upon GAAD. I didn’t caught it in my other channels. It’s quite large now, in terms of people, but still not reaching out enough, at least not for people that are not into accessibility already.
Seems like community would need to focus on marketing, not only on good content. But yes, it’s easy to complain and do nothing. So I decided to try out some concepts, just to check what kind of effects it will have. Think it has potential, but let’s test it in real life.
An app to learn about screen-readers, a short analysis and ask me anything
My plan for this year is not to have a webinar. I feel I don’t do my best in that way. Maybe some other time. Besides that there are literally hundreds of webinars with seasoned presenters way better in presenting than I am.
Voice-back, online escape room for screen-readers
We literally live besides screen-readers, they are with us almost any time of the day but we don’t know about it. Chances are that your mobile phone has a screen-reader built in and just waiting to be activated. Especially iOS devices. There you can use VoiceOver. And most Android devices also has their own screen-reader, called TalkBack. If not, it’s freely available from Google.
So Voice-back is a wordplay from words VoiceOver and TalkBack. Idea is to have a simple playground to check mobile screen-reader proficiency. Escape room felt as a good idea, so I went for it but basically it is just a set of quizzes where user has to find about content with help of screen-reader, with no user interface.
I managed to reserve a domain for that project; voice-back.net, please visit and try it out if you want to.
Second Slovenian Accessibility Awareness day
Short update for analysis of Slovenian websites that I made last year. I plan to do it a bit differently this year as we can check the first official reports from Web Accessibility Directive. I will publish it on https://cerovac.com/GAAD, please check it out after GAAD.
Ask me anything about accessibility session
I’ll also organize an internal “ask me anything” about accessibility session internally at my workplace and make a post about that afterwards. I present quite a lot about accessibility to my front-end and design coworkers, but this time it will for sure be more interesting when they will have a possibility to ask about their pain-points.
One day is absolutely not enough, but definitely better than none
We should maybe have Global Accessibility Awareness Month or maybe even a Year when we think about how bad the awareness still is. It’s getting better and better, but I am afraid that more because of legislation and less because of it is a right thing to do.
It’s a team effort and one of the important tasks is also to spread awareness along the different professional fields – design, content, development, testing, project management, stakeholders etc.
