Tomorrow (9th May) is the first annual global accessibility awareness day.
Accessibility with regards to websites is essentially making sure that your content can be consumed by all, this means not making assumptions on what people can use to navigate or consume content.
There are plenty of events going on across the world to help raise awareness amongst developers and designers to the various accessibility issues, a full run down of which can be found on the official Facebook page.
If you can’t get to any events (I don’t think there are any in Northern Ireland unfortunately, this is something I wouldn’t mind trying to change for next year) then everyone is encouraged to see if they can spend an hour either:
- Navigating websites you have built or your favourite websites without a mouse plugged into your computer.
- Navigating websites you have built or your favourite websites with your monitor turned off.
- Navigating websites you have built or your favourite websites on your smart phone with accessibility options turned on.
I have done all these before and I can tell you that every time I do any of the above it is a real eye opener and a real test of your design and content management skills.
There is also a twitter account created for the day which you can follow here.
Let us know how you get on tomorrow!