On Nov. 27, 2011, Joe Devon, a web developer out of Los Angeles, wrote an article about the need for accessibility in web design. “Much effort is going into the semantics of HTML5 for the purpose of accessibility. I’ve been toying with this idea for a couple years, but now the time has come to ask for your help. Let’s work together and fix this oversight in our knowledge. As a community, we can work together to change the world,” Devon wrote. “First, let’s agree on a Global Accessibility Awareness Day. This will be a day of the year where web developers across the globe try to raise awareness and know-how on making sites accessible. On this day, every web developer will be urged to test at least one page on their site in an accessibility tool. After fixing up the page, they are urged to blog about what they changed and inspire others to follow suit.”
When Jennison Asuncion, an accessibility professional from Canada, came across that article, he agreed – such a day would serve the community well. So he reached out to Devon and the two worked together to make it happen. They held the first Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May of 2012, and the event continues today. It has grown to a global event encouraging digital accessibility and challenging attendants to increase technological accessibility across the board and allowing for easy distribution of digital accessibility tools. Events include long-term challenges such as the 100 Days of Accessibility, which started at the University of Iowa in February, panel discussions, accessibility seminars, and even debuts of new accessibility tools and have in the past even included presentations by Apple and other tech companies. Back in 2011, the blog post that inspired the first GAAD stated that it wasn’t easy to learn about accessibility back then. “Relatively, there isn’t a lot of great information about accessibility out there. You really have to seek it out,” Devon wrote. Today, he is part of the solution to that problem all across the world. To learn more about GAAD and see a list of events being held for it, visit https://accessibility.day/.
