3 Ways to Recognize Global Accessibility Awareness Day

The third Thursday of May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And guess what? That’s today!

Here at eLearning Brothers, we love accessibility. We’re constantly striving to make sure our templates and course starters have appropriate color contrast, font sizes, and other accessibility features built-in so you have less to worry about when developing your eLearning content. 

We’re also proud of Lectora’s reputation as the accessibility leader in the eLearning development space and love collaborating with accessibility advocates like Susi Miller for webinars and her upcoming eLBX Online presentation.

Why an Accessibility Awareness Day?

The day was created by Joe Devon and Jennison Asuncion to try to make accessibility knowledge more mainstream among developers. The goal is to help more people think about, learn about, and experience digital accessibility.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day started in 2011, but the work continues.

In 2020, WebAIM analyzed one million home pages for accessibility issues and discovered that 98.1% of home pages had at least one WCAG 2.0 failure!

The most common accessibility mistakes on web pages include:

• Low contrast text
• Missing image alt text
• Empty links
• Missing form input labels
• And more

Are you making any of those mistakes in your online learning?

1 billion people worldwide have disabilities. There’s a good chance some of your learners are among that number. 

Inclusive, accessible design and development helps more learners benefit from your online training courses. 

And today, you can help spread the word about the importance of accessible eLearning!

3 Ways to Recognize Global Accessibility Awareness Day

1. Add captions to that how-to video you just posted on your company’s intranet. 
   
   Captions help people who are deaf or hard of hearing. They’re also great for office workers who don’t want to disturb their cubicle mates with audio but want to get the information from a video. 
   
   
2. Run the eLearning course you’re working on through an accessibility checker.
   
   Lectora has built-in accessibility settings, but you can also use an online tool like the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool from WebAIM.
   
   
3. Share some tips for building accessible interactions to your LinkedIn or Twitter feed. Use the hashtag #GAAD. 
   
   Looking for tips on building accessible interactions? You might enjoy this webinar.

Now get out there and spread the word about accessibility!

If you’re looking for a more accessibility-friendly authoring tool, sign up for a free trial of Lectora now.