Global Accessibility Awareness Day is the third Thursday in May each year. The day aims to get everyone talking about digital access and inclusion.
With more than one billion people around the world who live with disabilities it can be a struggle to navigate the global digital space if websites themselves contain errors or other issues that make accessing them difficult. For example, if a website aimed at assisting people with vision impairment had a low colour contrast the site would be difficult to read and in danger of not reaching its target audience, as it would be too hard to use.
Every year, WebAIM runs an automated accessibility evaluation for one million website home pages. In 2022, they found that 96.8% of home pages had detectable Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 failures. This is actually an improvement from 2021 where 97.4% had failures.
The three most common failures found were low contrast of text (84%), missing alternative text for images (55%) and links that did not work (50%). These are all easy to fix. By raising awareness of these issues, we make the digital space a better place to participate.
In 2022, Global Accessibility Awareness Day is on Thursday 19 May. Click here to find more information, including events happening around the world.