May 21st marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a campaign to raise awareness of digital accessibility run by a non-profit foundation that began in 2011. I discovered GAAD last year and used the occasion to plug some of our staff development, but it was too late to do much more than that. This year we’ve had time to plan more, turning it into Accessibility Month at Sunderland.
We’ve running weekly staff development sessions on accessibility all throughout May, and timed the release of the new Accessibility Checker tool in Canvas for today. This enhanced tool can now scan entire modules for issues and suggest fixes like adding missing ALT text and correcting insufficient contrast between foreground and background elements.
To raise awareness within the University we published an article on our SharePoint site, and released a two part podcast on May 8th and today. I’m not on either, I deferred the honours to my team, and in today’s episode we invited an academic on to talk about accessibility from their perspective.