It’s evident that we still need accessibility awareness. Recent studies like WebAim’s Million and State of Mobile App Accessibility prove that. And it’s even more important to spread awareness about disabilities and what is our role to prevent us from contributing passively or actively to further disabling other people. As individuals, as organizations and as countries.
I am honored to be a part of GAAD in Slovenia (in Slovenian, opens in new window), as a member of the Institute for digital accessibility A11y.si, and I even got to share two online presentations this year. I love sharing, but I also love learning. And with accessibility, and listening to people with disabilities we can always learn. As everybody has their own experiences, unique to them, and as disabilities are way more complex that they are sometimes presented to us. It’s extremely valuable to learn from people with different perspectives.
GAAD can mean a lot of different things to different people. I think it has a lot to do with accessibility maturity. On multiple levels. Starting on country level. And implementation of legislation. Like for example European Accessibility Act, here in Europe. Unfortunately I can’t ignore the low accessibility maturity that I can see in some countries in Europe. You can observe it very quickly – just open your local European Accessibility Act (open in new window) and observe how was the translation of people with disabilities done. In some countries it’s equal to “invalid”.
Now this is just a word, one can argue, but when we consider the reality, we can establish that people with disabilities cover way more people. When we understand that disabilities can be permanent, situational and temporary. And by the social model of disabilities it is evident that stakeholders responsible for legislation implementation and translation are still early on their accessibility maturity journeys.
If we consider state / country and it’s legislation at the top, followed by organizations and then people – I think that definitions and names are important. Especially for awareness. And there is no action before there is awareness. Even when we don’t see as much action as we would like or need, it’s difficult to even build awareness when definitions implicitly covers less people. That potentially signals organizations and people that it’s not about them. And they unfortunately care less. Again a sign of low or non-existing accessibility maturity in my opinion.
Nevertheless, GAAD is extremely valuable if we make it as such. Sure, there are organizations where GAAD is mostly an marketing activity, it’s always like that with lot’s of other initiatives, but I was happy to be a part of a GAAD with knowledge sharing about practical accessibility, both from my colleagues and from me and including people with disabilities and their representatives, not only talking about them.
I only wished that GAAD would be interesting enough for so called main stream media and not only living in a bubble of people that already recognize accessibility and are already aware and trying their best to implement it. Such awareness is for sure good as well, but it’s reach is not far enough.
I also loved to hear my same thoughts from people with disabilities that we need to do more as a society – and not only more – but earlier. We need to shift accessibility “left” – it needs to become a systematic thing already in primary schools. Just imagine what positive impacts would that have on our society – when more people would understand and implement at least basics, starting already in their youth?
