Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Global Accessibility Awareness Day takes place on  19th of May. Berkshire Vision member Dayzie has written an article for us about accessibility.

How do we educate society in accessibility? 

Accessibility, accessing the world in a unique way. The awareness day is to make the people understand about the mission to disrupt the culture of technology and make the internet world inclusive by including accessibility as a core requirement. Society makes it so hard to be inclusive to those with a disability through out the internet. Even in the 21st century, people are still being oblivious and ignore the impossible challenges people face trying to access the internet with a disability. Why are people not being educated in the meaning of accessibility in this generation? Over 1 billion people worldwide have disabilities, so why is society not including the disabled in the internet network? 1 billion people struggle using the internet because of how inaccessible it is. The freedom of using the internet should be available to everyone, it should be accessible to everyone without it mattering that they have a disability. Why should it be okay for some people to access the internet independently and some people can’t?  Everyone deserves to be able to access the internet if they want too.

How could you be inclusive towards the people who struggle with accessing the digital world?

When posting pictures online, add alternative text. The use for this, is so a Voice Over user or a screen reader user, who can not see the picture, so that they can recall the information that is being shared and understand what the picture is by listening to your image description. People who add alternative text, open up the information that is being shared to a wider range of audiences. What an image description does, is create a short ,detailed description of an image that is being shared despite not being able to see the picture. This helps because without a description of some sort, people who are blind or visually impaired have no idea of what is being shared.

You could use CamelCase in your hashtags, this means the first letter of a word is capitalised so when multiple words are put together, it is easier to understand when a screen reader reads the hashtag out.

If you share content through a video format, try and add audio description instead of having music or silence. Audio description is when you perform something in a audio format, so you could talk and describe what’s going on.

Another way you could easily help making the internet accessible is to not use lots of emojis, and only use emojis at the end of the text. Screen readers read out the description of all emojis you say, simple is more, using less emojis make it so much easier to understand what your talking about.

The blind and visually impaired community are not the only ones who struggle accessing the online system, if I listed every disability and what you could do to help all in one go it would be an incredibly long list. 

Accessibility means being able to adapt something or somewhere so that everyone can experience everything in the same inclusive way. So many people may be uneducated on what they could do to help make the digital world accessible, so the more people that educate themselves or spread awareness, the more accessible things will become. Accessibility Awareness Day is to spread awareness on the access needs that need to be in place to create the most accessible online network and the big mission is to include accessibility as a core requirement within the internet. “To remove barriers that make internet impossible to access for those with a disability”

There are so many barriers that make it impossible to navigate the world wide web, but it doesn’t need to be that way. The big goal from accessibility awareness day is to spread the word to remove those barriers and educate the uneducated. Why should the internet be so inaccessible? Digital technology has advanced so much but making technology accessible for all has not. By spreading awareness, you are enabling everyone to access the same information. Let’s alert society and let’s make sure make everyone aware that the online world needs to be accessible to all.