Held annually on the third Thursday in May, Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is designed to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion.
GAAD centers on promoting awareness in making technology accessible and usable by people with disabilities across the board and providing real direction to those who seek it, and features, among other things, global discussions, meet-ups and hands-on demos that encourage everyone to consider digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) access and inclusion for people of all abilities.
Why digital accessibility matters
Individuals with disabilities often face barriers when trying to access websites, apps and other digital content. This lack of digital accessibility can limit people with disabilities in the workplace, the classroom and the community, and create challenges when it comes to participating in everyday activities that others take for granted, such as ordering food online or sharing updates on social media.
Designing technology products and services with greater access in mind creates an inclusive digital environment that benefits everyone. Going beyond assisting those in the disability community, access-first designs can help mobile device users better view and access information from cell phones, smart watches, tablets and other devices with smaller screens and support older adults whose abilities, eyesight, and dexterity change over time due to aging, enabling them to engage with digital content in their later years.
In addition to the ethical and moral reasons for making digital content accessible, there are also legal requirements. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that businesses and organizations make their websites and digital content accessible to people with disabilities.
Just last month, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a final rule that outlined specific requirements for making state and local government websites and mobile apps accessible to people with disabilities.
The rule, designed to ensure all digital services are compliant with the ADA, clarifies the obligations of governments to make their websites and mobile apps accessible to individuals with disabilities via the use of accessible text, images, sounds, videos, controls, animations and electronic documents. It closes gaps in the ADA, which set standards for physical sites but contained little direction for the accessibility of digital content, and notes specific requirements, including the adoption of technical standards as outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA, for making services, programs, and activities accessible through the web and mobile apps.
Pillars of web content accessibility
WCAG, an internationally recognized accessibility standard for web access, defines digital accessibility success around four principles that state online content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (POUR).
Perceivable – Information and interface components must be presentable in ways that users can perceive, regardless of which senses they do or do not have. Tips on making a website more perceivable include providing alt text for images, larger fonts, properly formatted hyperlinks and simpler layouts to make it easier for users to see and hear content. This also includes adding captions, transcripts and audio description to videos and audio files for users who are deaf or hard-of-hearing or blind or with low vision.
Operable – A website’s interface and navigation must be able to be used by everyone. This includes making all site functionality (navigation menus, open and close windows, tabbed content) available from a keyboard, making it easier and more intuitive for users to navigate the site.
Understandable – An understandable website is one in which the content and website functions are clear to all users. This means people should not only be able to understand the information on web pages, but also how to navigate the site to find the information they want.
Robust – A robust website is one that is compatible with different technologies, including assistive technologies like screen readers and text-to-speech software. This means that as technology evolves, the content must remain accessible.
Though all websites and web designers strive to hit these marks, recent reports show that there still is ground to cover.
The state of accessibility
In its most recent report on web site accessibility, WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) found that 95.9% of the home pages it tested had at least one WCAG 2.0 failure.
WebAIM’s 2024 report evaluated the home pages of the top 1,000,000 web sites, looking for end-user accessibility barriers and WCAG conformance failures. Across the one million home pages, 56,791,260 distinct accessibility barriers were detected – an average of 56.8 barriers per page. The number of detected errors increased notably (13.6%) since the 2023 analysis which found 50 errors/page.
Some of the most common accessibility failures found in the report include low contrast text (found on 81% on home pages), missing image alt text (54.5%), missing form input labels (48.6%), empty links (44.6%), empty buttons (28.2%) and missing document language (17.1%).
Verbit’s mission
Innovation for disability is innovation for everyone, and when technology is developed to address the most complex of needs, it ends up benefiting all users. Designing with accessibility in mind creates environments that celebrate diversity and inclusivity and products that are more intuitive, feature-rich and, ultimately, able to reach and impact more people.
As the world’s leading verbal intelligence platform for speech-intensive industries, Verbit is committed to supporting and enhancing accessibility and inclusion with AI-enhanced transcription and captioning solutions that help make content accessible to all.
Powered by the latest technologies and a global network of human experts, we help businesses, organizations and individuals turn spoken audio and video into accessible and actionable text, ensure exceptional results while scaling to meet any need and set the standard for accuracy, efficiency and affordability.
We work closely with and encourage all our clients to expand their accessibility practices, and our wide variety of solutions – captioning, transcription and audio description – make it easy for everyone to reach their accessibility and inclusion goals.
“So many professionals know that prioritizing digital accessibility is the right thing to do, but few are actually doing it,” said Verbit CEO Yair Amsterdam. “It’s been amazing to work with some real changemakers this year who are doubling down on prioritizing tweaks and technologies to make for more inclusive online experiences. The icing on the cake is that those making these changes to improve online access are seeing dramatic benefits outside of the obvious ones – customer loyalty, greater audience reach and more. We’re excited to keep innovating to make it easier and easier for our community to deliver accessible videos, meetings and experiences to everyone.”