May is an exciting month full of change; spring is here, the flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, and the weather is getting nicer. Graduation season is upon us; thousands of graduates prepare to start the next chapter in life. May is also when we celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), and I would encourage all of you to use this month of change to inspire you to learn more about digital accessibility and learn how you can change your habits to make the digital world accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time.
About 27% of the population has some form of disability. These disabilities could affect vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, independent living, and self-care. Someone in your family or your office probably has some form of disability, whether you know it or not. Accessibility is doing the things that make it possible for anyone with or without a disability to be able to enter a building, read an email, or watch a video. Being aware of accessibility issues is the first step, and soon, we will launch a new digital accessibility overview training to help in this effort. Doing the work to make content accessible is the next step. In some cases, this will be easy as we create new content in an accessible manner. Making old content accessible could take more time, but we will all work on that together.
What can we do:
The first thing we can all do is to become more aware. On May 16th, we celebrate the 13th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day. There are several events highlighting accessibility. One particular online event that I invite you all to join is GAAD 2024, which the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota are co-hosting. This event is available to anyone in the University of Illinois System.
The second thing you can do is visit your university's ADA IT Accessibility Office. See the links below to learn more about the resources your university provides. In addition, please take a few minutes to read the In the Know: Expert Tips for Managing Digital Risk of this newsletter to see how easy it is to make Microsoft Word documents accessible from the start.
UIC Digital Accessibility
UIS Digital Accessibility
UIUC Digital Accessibility
Thanks,
Joe Barnes
Digital Risk Office
