Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) at Valtech

The third Thursday of May marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)—a day focused on digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people with disabilities and impairments. Accessibility is key to everything we do, because as we create new systems, solutions and processes, we must ensure that everyone has been considered in the creation. The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion.

With this in mind, we are highlighting our Accessibility Craft Circle within Valtech today. Craft circles are here to bring people together from across Valtech to share knowledge and experiences as well as learn new skills. We have circles dedicated to Frontend, Design and UX, Adobe, Agile & Lean and many more. Within our Accessibility Craft Circle, our work is focused on learning and educating on accessibility, sharing best practices and lessons learned and working to embed accessibility across Valtech’s ways of working and client interactions.

Today, we’re spotlighting the activities some of our Valtechies are doing to highlight and bring awareness to GAAD.

This year our craft day, a day to bring together all of our Craft Circles, will collide with the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and we want to highlight this by teaming up with the Service Design craft circle. To embed the importance of this topic, we are also collaborating with Useit who will bring some tools for us to use such as screen readers, eye tracking devices, switches, zoom controls, and a way to simulate cognitive load. The service design Craft Circle will also be prototyping a tool, focused on cognitive disabilities, designed to help designers and other disciplines with developing more accessible services and solutions by fostering more inclusive design processes and dialogues. Together we want to challenge ourselves to be more inclusive and considerate in the design process and in our daily work. With the help from Useit we hope to gain more insight into users with different needs.

Linn and Niklas will represent Valtech in Siteimprove’s GAAD event where we will talk about the benefits of considering accessibility when working with digital services. The talk will highlight the synergies with SEO, the missed market and why accessibility is important to consider in the world today.

Check out the agenda for the virtual event on the Siteimprove website.

The global Frontend Craft Circle is having a half-day conference with lectures on frontend best practices, news and case studies. In honor of GAAD, we have included two talks on the topic on how we’re embedding accessibility with our clients (such as the National Trust), by Jacqueline Cardozo & Rob Pataki. We’ll be celebrating the importance of accessibility with talks, demos and presentations. We’re also sure to hammer the importance of real user testing as much as we can, as without that we’re still just shooting in the dark.

Our aim is to make more frontend developers aware of accessibility and learn from others’ experiences.

To help further our education on accessibility, in the coming weeks, we have booked an illuminating and entertaining session with Adi Latif from AbilityNet, a pioneering UK charity with a global perspective that works to bring the power of digital technology to everyone, regardless of ability or age.

Adi will take us on a journey where we are aiming to experience what the digital world is like from a blind person’s perspective.

This educational and enlightening session will provide Valtechies with:

· An understanding of what is digital accessibility and inclusive design.

· A profound understanding of why making digital products and services accessible is great for business and society as a whole.

· First-hand experience of seeing a blind person navigate a good and a bad digital experience.

· Understanding the business case for accessibility and inclusive design.

· A high-level roadmap of the key areas to consider in your digital accessibility journey.

Moving forward, we’ll investigate additional learning sessions to widen our knowledge on creating accessible solutions.

Accessibility is key to our work here at Valtech, and transparently we are on a journey with a number of important and necessary changes in our pipeline. For more updates on how we’re embedding accessibility in all we do, follow us on social media and check our website blog.