Global Accessibility Awareness Day - 2024
Did you know that 1 billion people worldwide have disabilities? The most common disabilities or impairments are visual, hearing, motor and cognitive. The purpose of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is simple: to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access, equity and inclusion. The GAAD Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to disrupt the culture of technology and digital product development to include accessibility as a core requirement.
Supporting GAAD
One of the very many ways that we can support GAAD at WSU is to set aside some time in May to review our websites. We've created a brief checklist of tasks you can do over the month:
- Sort your pages in the CMS by last updated. What hasn't been updated in awhile? Is the content still relevant and/or accessible?
- Review your content inventory and files in the file manager of the CMS. What files are old and not being used? Are there PDFs that could be webpages?
- Go over a section in our Virtual Accessibility Training course in Canvas to refresh your knowledge on a topic that you may be less familiar about.
- Schedule a time to talk to our Web Accessibility Coordinator, Krystal Tosch, about any accessibility questions you may have.
- Take a few moments to look at the 5-minute fixes dashboard in Siteimprove and fix mispellings, broken links or add alt text to images.
By participating in any of the above mentioned suggestions, you can remove barriers and positively impact our current and future Warriors.
Content inventory
You can easily pull a content inventory from the CMS menu into an Excel spreadsheet. You can review old files and pages. We recommend ordering it by last updated; you may discover old content that perhaps shouldn't be online anymore.
5-minute fixes
We have created a customized dashboard that will allow you to make changes quickly to your site. This dashboard focuses on misspellings, images needing alt text and broken links. You can access this dashboard by:
- Logging into Siteimprove
- Clicking on the dropdown arrow to the right of DCI Score Dashboard
- Selecting _Five Minute Fixes from the options.
Once you are there, we recommend selecting a category to work on! Over time, you will improve your website’s overall accessibility. We know that improving the accessibility of a website can seem like a daunting task and our hope is that this will give you small areas of focus that make a big impact on your website.
Coming up
We will be sending out emails throughout the summer. They will contain smaller bits of information (like this one) and content with the hope that you can take the information presented and apply some small, quick changes to your site. We know summer can be busy for many and want to provide you with quick tips and tricks that you can apply over time.