Join hosts Natalie Garza and Natalie MacLees for the 23rd episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day. They discuss the day’s origins, its purpose, and current statistics on digital accessibility from WebAIM. Listeners will also learn why accessibility is vital and find practical steps and resources to make digital content more inclusive.
Natalie Garza: Hello everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility podcast. My name is Natalie Garza. I’m one of the co-hosts, and with me today is:
Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host.
Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to bring awareness on this very special episode. What are we celebrating today, Natalie?
Natalie MacLees: Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
Natalie Garza: Yes, it is a special holiday that the accessibility community brought together, that we do every single year, and this year it happens to fall on May 15th, 2025.
Natalie MacLees: Yes. The third Thursday of May.
Natalie Garza: Yes. Do you wanna talk about how it was founded, who founded it, and what year it was founded?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. So, it all started with a blog post from Joe Devon proposing the idea that we needed an accessibility awareness day to help raise awareness for digital accessibility. He tweeted about it, and another accessibility professional named Jennison Asuncion, saw that tweet and said, “Yep, we need this, I’m on board.” And they co-founded Global Accessibility Awareness Day together.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, a new holiday. I don’t know if it’s fair to say it’s a holiday, but I will say it’s a holiday.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. A celebrated day, an observed day.
Natalie Garza: Observational day! What is the whole point of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, if the title doesn’t already explain?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, in case it wasn’t already self-explanatory. We wanna get everybody thinking about digital accessibility. So, people who don’t know anything about it, we wanna try to get the word out to them, get everybody talking about it, thinking about it, learning about it, and committing to making anything that they make online a little bit more accessible.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. So spreading awareness to turn into action. Hopefully.
Natalie MacLees: Yes. Most people know. They will hopefully understand the importance of digital accessibility and want to take steps. To make their online presence more accessible.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, because I think the problem is not that people don’t wanna be accessible or that they don’t think it’s important, I think they’re just not aware. It’s just not common knowledge.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. You find that a lot. I think, you know, we’ve talked about how accessibility isn’t included in a lot of web development education or web design education. It’s just not included, which kind of silently communicates this idea that it’s not actually that important. And then also for people who are less technical but are in charge of websites, so business owners, marketing teams, et cetera, are in charge of websites, but maybe not super technical, and they may have absolutely no idea that this is something that they even need to be thinking about or planning for, or making changes to how they’re accomplishing things.
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so digital accessibility, not everyone is on the same page, so that’s why we have this celebratory observational day.
Natalie MacLees: Yes, we try to get the word out and reach out to people who may not get the word otherwise. And how people usually celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day is by hosting a bunch of free events. So if you, well, you could go to the official website and there is just all kinds of workshops and webinars and in-person events and online events, all with the purpose of learning a little bit more about digital accessibility.
And typicall, those are all free, just in observance of the holiday.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. And podcasts. So we’re gonna do our, we’re gonna do our part in spreading awareness. So Natalie, to kick us off, what is digital accessibility?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so, digital accessibility is making sure that anything that you have put online, social media posts, your website, et cetera, that that is accessible to everybody so that they’re able to use that regardless of their capacity and regardless of what technology or assistive technology they might be using to access the web.
We do have a kind of discouraging statistic from WebAIM, which is Web Accessibility In Mind. They do an annual study, they automatically scan the top 1 million homepages on the internet, and report back on their findings. And so from the most recent round of WebAIM Million, we know that 98% of those top 1 million homepages have at least one detectable accessibility failure on them.
You know, which is almost all of them, and that number has improved only a tiny bit from when they did the first one a few years ago.
Natalie Garza: And when you say detectable, you mean by automated scanning?
Natalie MacLees: Exactly, yes. They are not manually testing a million pages because that would take a very long time. They’re just running their automated checker on those. Yes. So it’s the types of issues that can be detected by an automated checker.
Natalie Garza: Which means that it’s likely a hundred percent of those homepages have an issue whether manual or automated on them.
Natalie MacLees: It is likely just because it’s very difficult to make something quote unquote “perfectly accessible,” that doesn’t really exist. Um, So there’s always gonna be some kind of barrier. But, that’s not an excuse to not do anything that we can to reduce the number of barriers and to reduce the severity of the barriers that we have.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, cause’ believe it or not, one fourth of the population has some form of a disability.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, and I think that might even be a little bit low, ’cause one thing that we often, when we say “one in four people has a disability,” in our minds, we think permanent disability. Right, which are the ones that once you’ve acquired that disability, you’re gonna have it for the rest of your life. But we also have temporary disabilities.
Like every single one of us is constantly moving in and out of a state of being temporarily disabled by an illness or by an injury, right? Nobody lives their whole life without ever getting sick or hurt. And depending on how severe that injury is. It could affect your work in different ways. If you work on a computer all the time, a pretty minor injury to your dominant hand, wrist, or arm could be really impactful upon your workday, and you might not be able to use a mouse for a certain period of time.
So that’s another thing to keep in mind. And then we also have situational disabilities where it has nothing to do with your own personal body or mind, but the situation that you happen to be in, which can also impact how you use the web. If you’re trying to watch a video in a really noisy room, or you’re trying to look at the screen of your phone outside on a really bright, sunny day, it’s really difficult to see.
And that would just be a situational disability. So when you take into account all of those things. It’s not one in four people. It’s literally everyone.
Natalie Garza: And it’s not just blind people either. A lot of people just think, “oh, if you can’t see the screen,” but it’s also if you have a mobility impairment, if you can’t hear something. If you have seizures from flashing elements.
Natalie MacLees: I remember that you were surprised to learn how many different disabilities could impact someone’s use of digital products.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, and we’re gonna cover that in an episode soon. So stay tuned.
Natalie MacLees: Okay. That was a sneak peek.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, so digital accessibility. Make sure everybody, no matter their situation, their abilities can access and read web content. So, what can we do to start making the web a better place?
Natalie MacLees: We can start learning some basics about web accessibility and start making changes to what we’re doing. You could learn about how you can make your social media posts more accessible. You could learn how to make your own website more accessible. If you post videos online like we do here, or audio. If you have a podcast, you could learn how you can make that more accessible and then start taking steps to implement those things.
Natalie Garza: Yes, because even if it’s just a small thing like a social media post, it could mean a lot to one person who just wants to learn or see what’s there, or just wants to use social media like everyone else.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, I, people have a civil right to equal access to information and services, and so we need to be respectful of that and ensure that everybody can access the information and services that are available online.
Natalie Garza: Yes. So with that, Natalie, where can people go to learn about accessibility or get started?
Natalie MacLees: Well, you can come over to AAArdvarkAccessibility.com. It is free to sign up for a workspace and get an automated scan of your homepage, and it will explain to you any of the issues that were found and tell you how you can go about getting those fixed.
Natalie Garza: Yes, and if you wanna start learning about the different guidelines and the different official documentation, but find it a little confusing. We also have a new resource called WCAG in Plain English, which is a collection of all the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Is that the acronym?
Natalie MacLees: Yes, that’s the acronym. Good job.
Natalie Garza: But rewritten in plain language so that everyone can understand.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, great. For beginners to kind of just get a grasp for what is this accessibility thing all about and what kinds of things do I need to be doing?
Natalie Garza: Even if you just wanna scroll through it and see what’s there and understand the different aspects of making content accessible, it’s pretty helpful. So go check ’em out.
And with that, this is episode 23, our Special Global Accessibility Awareness Day podcast. Thank you guys for joining us, and with that, we’ll talk to y’all next time.
