In recognition of Global Accessibility Awareness Day
What is GAAD?
Observed every year on the third Thursday of May, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, (GAAD), is a worldwide movement dedicated to getting people thinking, talking, and actively learning about digital access and inclusion for people with disabilities. What started as a grassroots call to action in 2011 has grown into a global event recognized by Fortune 500 companies, governments, and organizations across six continents. Tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon now mark the day with accessibility updates, public commitments, and awareness campaigns.
The goal is deceptively simple: get web developers, designers, product managers, and content creators to stop and ponder a question they rarely ask: can everyone actually use what I’m building?
The Access Problem
More than 1.3 billion people, roughly 16% of the global population, experience some form of disability. That includes people who are blind or have low vision, people who are Deaf or hard of hearing, people with motor impairments who navigate with a keyboard or switch device rather than a mouse, and people with cognitive disabilities who may struggle with complex layouts, blinking content, or unclear language.
When we build websites and applications that don’t account for these users, we aren’t just creating inconvenience. We are locking people out of vital services. Out of job applications. Out of healthcare information. Out of banking. Out of education.
Disabled people already face significantly higher rates of unemployment as nearly 70% of blind Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and inaccessible hiring technology makes that gap even wider. When a government benefits website can’t be navigated by keyboard, the people who most need those benefits become the least able to access them.
Digital accessibility is, at its core, a question of who gets to participate. In 2024, the Department of Justice published a final rule under Title II of the ADA establishing specific technical requirements for web content and mobile apps that confirmed what courts had long been affirming: inaccessible digital spaces constitute discrimination. But legal compliance is a floor, not a ceiling, and according to WebAIM’s 2026 analysis of one million homepages, 95.9% still have detectable WCAG failures. Most inaccessible websites aren’t even meeting the legal minimum.
What “Accessible” Actually Means
Web accessibility means building digital content that can be perceived, understood, navigated, and interacted with by people using a wide range of technologies and abilities. The international standard guiding this work is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The current version, WCAG 2.2, organizes requirements around four core principles: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. These guidelines are often remembered by the acronym POUR.
In practice, that means things like:
- Adding descriptive alt text to images so screen reader users know what they’re looking at
- Ensuring sufficient color contrast between text and background so people with low vision or color blindness can read your content
- Making every interactive element, buttons, menus, forms, reachable and usable with a keyboard alone
- Writing clear, plain-language copy and providing consistent, predictable navigation
- Including captions for video content so Deaf users aren’t excluded from your multimedia
None of these are exotic engineering challenges. Most are small decisions made early in the design and development process. The problem is that for too long, they’ve been treated as optional extras or things to circle back to later, if there’s time, if there’s budget. There is rarely time. There is rarely budget. And so they don’t get done.
Why Developers Need to Own This
GAAD places particular emphasis on developers and technologists.
Designers can create accessible mockups, but if a developer implements a custom button as a <div> instead of a <button> element, keyboard users lose access. Copywriters can write clear content, but if a developer doesn’t structure it with proper heading hierarchy, screen reader users can’t navigate it efficiently. Legal teams can flag compliance requirements, but if developers don’t understand how to meet them, the knowledge stops at the door.
Accessibility lives or dies in the code. That means the people writing the code need to understand it as a core part of the craft.
The good news is that the tools have never been better. Browser developer tools now include built-in accessibility panels. Free tools like the WAVE browser extension, axe DevTools, and Lighthouse can audit a page in seconds. Screen readers — NVDA and JAWS for Windows, VoiceOver on Mac and iOS, TalkBack on Android — are freely available for testing. There is no shortage of resources. What’s been missing is the habit of reaching for them.
Accessible Design Is Simply Better Design
If the billions of people with disabilities aren’t motivation enough, many accessible design features actually make your product better for everyone.
Captions don’t just help Deaf users. They also help someone watching a video on mute in a crowded waiting room, or someone learning a second language who benefits from seeing words alongside hearing them. High color contrast doesn’t just help someone with low vision. It also helps anyone reading on a phone in bright sunlight. Clear, simple navigation doesn’t just help people with cognitive disabilities, it helps a stressed parent trying to find information quickly.
This is sometimes called the curb cut effect, named for the sidewalk ramps originally built to help wheelchair users. Those same ramps turned out to benefit people pushing strollers, delivery workers with hand trucks, cyclists, and travelers with rolling luggage. Designing for disability built infrastructure that improved life for nearly everyone.
The same principle holds online. Semantic HTML improves SEO. Keyboard navigability improves usability on smart TVs and game consoles. Readable typography reduces cognitive load across the board. Accessibility and usability aren’t competing concerns.
What You Can Do Today
GAAD isn’t asking for a full accessibility overhaul by end of day. It’s asking for a start.
Audit what you have. Run your site through a free tool like Google Lighthouse or WebAIM’s WAVE checker. You’ll likely find quick wins in missing alt text, low-contrast text, or unlabeled form fields.
Try navigating with a keyboard. Unplug or set aside your mouse. Tab through your website. Can you reach every link, button, and form field? Can you tell where you are on the page? If not, your site has a barrier that affects real users right now.
Learn the vocabulary. WCAG, ARIA, semantic HTML — these don’t require a certification course to understand at a useful level. The W3C maintains free tutorials, and WebAIM.org offers plain-language guidance for developers at every experience level.
Build it into your process. The most sustainable accessibility improvements come from shifting left — catching issues in design reviews and code reviews rather than retrofitting them after launch. Even adding a single accessibility checkpoint to your development workflow makes a difference over time.
The Bigger Picture
For those of us working in disability advocacy, this day carries real weight. We see daily how inaccessible technology restricts independence, limits opportunity, and sends a clear message to disabled people: you weren’t considered.
We also see what’s possible when the same creativity that goes into beautiful interfaces gets applied to building ones that actually work for everyone.
At Blind Industries and Services of Maryland (BISM), we know this firsthand. Our instructors, most of whom are blind themselves, teach non-visual technology skills to blind and low-vision Marylanders every day: how to navigate a computer without a mouse, use screen reading software, browse the internet, and manage a smartphone independently.
We can teach those skills, but what we can’t do is guarantee the websites and platforms our students encounter were built with them in mind. That gap is exactly what web accessibility is meant to close, and it’s why we hold ourselves to the same standard on our own site.
The internet was envisioned as a great equalizer. A place where barriers of geography, mobility, and circumstance could be reduced. That vision is still worth building toward.
This GAAD, we invite every developer, designer, and product builder to take one step. Audit one page. Fix one issue. Learn one thing. It adds up. And the people waiting on the other side of those barriers will feel every bit of it.
