Global Accessibility Awareness Day
May 18, 2023
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is a day about making technology more inclusive for everyone, no matter a person's range of ability or disability. Many aspects of life are going digital more than ever, making it important to ensure their equality and accessibility.
Read on to learn how you can celebrate GAAD, spread awareness, and learn what we're doing at WWU to ensure inclusive digital content for all.
The 2023 Accessibility Advocates
Accessibility Advocates is an honorific given to Western employees who show how they make accessibility part of their daily work in web or digital content. This recognition highlights the importance of accessibility in a digital world, and celebrates the excellence of those who have worked to make Western websites more accessible for everyone.
This Year's Awardees
This round of nominees recognizes those who've been doing above and beyond work in Western's initial digital accessibility efforts, starting around 2016 until now in early 2023.
Lisa Brennan
Communications Consultant, Capital Planning and Development
"Everyone should have the chance to participate in life in ways that are meaningful to them. And our communities need the benefits that come from diverse minds working collaboratively to find creative and humane paths forward. Those are the basics of why I care about accessibility and inclusion on the web and everywhere else."
Chris Casquilho
Manager of Marketing and Special Events, College of Fine and Performing Arts
"We are very excited to share the information about our events, faculty, and students. Since we want as many people as possible to know all about it, we want to make sure that anyone and everyone can find and use the information easily. Imagining how different users access our digital content opens new opportunities for us to imagine how information is shared, which improves all of our work."
Justene Merriman
Multimedia Designer, College of Fine and Performing Arts
"Accessibility is for everybody: Disabled, differently abled, neuro-divergent, boringly average, or super-powered. It goes beyond simply removing the limitations on access, and makes things easier for everyone. Accessibility is quintessential to all forms of inclusion, and a path to innovating a more beautiful world."
John Thompson
Assistant Director, Office of University Communications
"As a storyteller, I want all my readers to be able to experience the entirety of whatever story I am trying to convey. Dave [Engebretson] and Carly [Gerard] have worked patiently with me to make sure that my stories and anything I am trying to share with the campus via Western Today are available and accessible for readers of every ability to experience, and that nobody, through no fault of their own, is given less access to any story I am trying to tell. Accessibility is really, at its core, about equality."
David Bass
Senior Developer for Digital Initiatives, Western Libraries
Mark Miller
IT Manager, Fairhaven College
Featured Accessibility Work
Web Communication Technologies (WebTech) strives to make the web a little more accessible each day, within and beyond the Western community.
Western's main homepage in top 5% most accessible homepages
According to WebAIM's Million homepage report, the landing page for the main WWU site is reported in the top 5% percent of most accessible homepages.
The dataset was collected in February 2023, and contains a million homepages across the entire web landscape. This year Western ranked at position #32,417—this makes it the third year in a row that the WWU homepage has been in the top 5%.
While we've worked to get there, there's always room for improvement and to make Western's homepage more inclusive for our audience.
Drupal websites now ship with Able Player
WebTech staff Max Bronsema and Nigel Packer have developed an Able Player Drupal module that plays video in the most accessible media player available today.
Able Player was originally built by Terrill Thompson, accessibility developer for the University of Washington. It is actively developed on GitHub.
The player provides tracks for captions, audio description, transcripts, and sign language. There are also multiple video and accessibility features like language support, customization around caption styles, and transcript highlighting. See how Able Player works (photo and example credit: University of Washington).
If you're interested in using Able Player for your Drupal site, please contact webhelp@wwu.edu.
WebTech contributes accessibility fixes to Drupal
In the last year, WebTech has contributed patches to Drupal core, the web platform that runs sites like this one. One of these patches was accepted and is now set to release with Drupal version 10.1.x. A patch was also submitted to Webform, a module used by many Western websites on Drupal.
These fixes also benefit websites in education, business, art, and other sectors who use Drupal and its modules.
Explore GAAD
There are plenty of ways to celebrate GAAD, from learning more about digital accessibility to making changes. Here are some ideas and activities to try.
May 18th 4:30pm, VU 735 (Multipurpose Room) GAAD Kahoot Trivia
Come celebrate GAAD with the Disability Outreach Center (DOC)! The DOC is hosting trivia about GAAD and accessibility best practices, with a chance to win some exciting prizes. All are welcome to join.
For questions or accommodations, please email DOC.Community@wwu.edu.
Play Hocus Focus
Halloween may be a few months away, but this quick game shows why sites need to be keyboard accessible.
Gain accessibility knowledge on Frontier
Build on your accessibility training with courses like accessibility for documents, emails, websites, and deep dive courses like alt text.
Make a 5-minute fix
Every accessibility improvement makes a difference, even if it only takes a few minutes to fix. If you're in Siteimprove, you can view quick fix issues for your site.
Some helpful fast fixes include:
- Updating link text to be more meaningful
- Adding heading structure to a page
- Adding alt text to informative or meaningful images