Global Accessibility Awareness Day

What is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)?

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), is celebrated every year, the third Thursday of May. It all started in 2011 with a blog post written by a Los Angeles-based web developer, Joe Devon.

In Joe’s post, he wrote about web accessibility, screen readers and the many efforts at the time that were being invested in HTML5 towards accessibility. Joe also proposed to start a Global Accessibility Awareness Day, once a year, for web developers to get together, and “as a community change the world.”

An accessibility professional from Toronto, Jennison Asuncion, found the post made made contact with Joe. They established GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessday.org and since 2015 this event has been celebrated on the second Thursday of May.

Purpose

The main purpose of GAAD is to get people talking, learning an collaborating about accessibility. Here at the University of Washington Bothell, we celebrate GAAD for almost a week, so we call it “GAAW” or Global Accessibility Awareness Week.