Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is on May 15, 2025 and has been recognised as a significant day within the global disability community for the past 14 years. According to the official website for GAAD, the purpose of the day is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.
The whole day was inspired by a blog post from web-developer Joe Devon in 2011 where he spoke about the shortage of accessible information and tools, emphasising the necessity for others working in tech to integrate accessibility considerations into their practice, just like how they ensure things like browser compatibility. Joe highlighted the importance of tools like screen readers, and the need for developers to familiarise themselves with these technologies.The blog post was a call to action for the tech community to prioritise digital accessibility. The blog post was then seen by an accessibility professional (Jennison Asuncion) who decided to partner up with Joe to combine their passions, knowledge and differing backgrounds to make GAAD a reality. You can find out more about the origins of GAAD here.
So what does this day look like now 14 years later? Well, there are lots of ways to get involved. There are over 100 registered events happening globally that you can register for through the GAAD website that cover a wide range of activities related to digital accessibility. You can create your own event, you can spread awareness of the day to those around you, or most importantly you can participate in improving your own practices and knowledge in digital accessibility.
The GAAD website makes the following suggestions of how you can expand your knowledge:
1- Watch a Disability Awareness video. There are a lot to choose from both online and offline. To begin, here’s a 3-minute Disability Sensitivity video that has an audio described version, too.
2- Read about updated disability language. This is a great Disability Style Guide from the National Center on Disability and Journalism. Or, check out the book Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau.
3- Incorporate your newfound knowledge into daily life. Once you’re ready for more, choose a topic from the following sections to journey onward.
One of the areas from the above list that we at JAM are passionate about and like to discuss with our community is making social media more inclusive. As an online clothing brand, we utilise social media a lot as a marketing tool and a way to connect with the JAM community. Therefore it’s extremely important that our content is accessible and inclusive to our community, most of whom have a disability. We also often get questions about some of our more-visible accessibility features on our social media accounts from non-disabled people, and so we find it’s a great conversation starter around the importance of digital inclusion.
Whenever we post content from JAM’s social media accounts, we ensure there are both image descriptions and alt texts used (yes, there is a difference and yes, both should always be used), we provide captions on videos, we ensure graphics are high contrast, we limit our emoji use for screen readers and we always use inclusive language. All of these measures whilst intentional, are not difficult to incorporate and do not rely on expert knowledge or skills to implement. And whilst some of them may be subtle and only visible to those that actively use them, some like image descriptions are very clear for everyone that engages with our content to see. This display of digital accessibility shows the disability community that they are actively considered in our day-to-day practices and demonstrates to those from outside the community how easy it is to be inclusive to all.
So this week (and every week) we implore you to consider how accessible the many different digital platforms you engage with are to the disability community, and how through some small, simple changes you could make a world of difference to so many people around you.
