Today is the 10th Global Accessibility Awareness Day! The day was created to place a spotlight on digital access and inclusion. There are more than 1 billion people with disabilities/impairments and we all have a responsibility to make sure our web spaces are inclusive because “every user deserves a first-rate experience on the web.” We still have a long way to go until we reach an accessible web environment for everyone. In 2020 WebAim reviewed 1 million homepages and found 98.1% of the pages had at least 1 WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 failure and an average 60.9 errors per homepage! We often hear in education and academia how the web has made so much possible and has allowed for a global citizenship, especially after this past year, but that we need to work on issues surrounding our digital divide. While the digital divide is extremely important to find solutions to, what is less discussed is how that is only part of the equation. If we don’t address the issues of accessibility on the web having access to digital technologies will still fall short of being truly equitable.
The Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) website is a great place to explore the impact of accessibility issues and find resources to learn more. For instance, they discuss the most common errors on web homepages and these are failures that most people without visual, hearing, or cognitive disabilities/impairments might not even know can be problematic.
Here at the Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center we are working hard to make sure our web resources are accessible for all. For instance, all of our Research Guides must meet the requirements set forth on our Style Guide and that includes an accessibility page . Looking for resources you can use to check color contrast, learn about alternative text, or start to think about how screen readers work with formatting of a page? Be sure to check out this guide for tips and tricks.
Your Student Success and Engagement Librarian, Kelleen Maluski, has also presented on how to build accessible presentations that includes information on general best practices. You can find her slides, speaker transcript, and bibliography here.
We all need to be thinking about accessibility as we work to develop materials for others that have any digital aspects. So, be sure to use the resources above and check out events happening for Global Accessibility Awareness Day here.
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