Getting Ready for GAAD – Week 4

What is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)?

Global Accessibility Awareness Day, taking place on 20th May, is an international event encouraging all people to think, talk, and learn about digital accessibility and inclusion. This is the fourth and final week in our ‘Getting Ready for GAAD’ blog post series where we invite staff and students to get involved through small, yet meaningful actions in support of accessibility.

We will be adding more videos to our YouTube channel and on TikTok this week. Please share these with colleagues and students.

Workshops/events this week…

Friday 14th May 1pm-2pm [Online workshop]
Making Accessible Word Documents
This session will take place on Microsoft Teams. Use join code 0isrmfj to access the team for this session (please note: join code starts with a zero).

Event on 20th May…

Thursday 20th May at 3pm [Online event].

Dr Kevin Merry from De Montfort University, giving a keynote talk: Institution-wide approaches to embedding accessibility. Sign-up to attend at the eventbrite page. This event is open to staff at both University of Brighton and University of Sussex.

Take action

There are lots of ways to take part in our celebration of GAAD. Even if you can only dedicate a little bit of time, every action helps… Even small ones.

Even small actions are meaningful

This week we are doing something different. Fiona has long maintained that if you can write an accessible announcement you can create any/all content accessibly in My Studies (Blackboard Learn).

Here is a Sway featuring tips and short microlearning videos (brand new) explaining how to write accessible announcements. It is not perfect by any means but it has been a month-long labour of love on Fiona’s part (please send Fiona feedback via Twitter, Microsoft Teams, or leave a comment below).

Direct link to the Sway presentation.

Direct link to the Sway presentation accessible view.

Tips for you and your students

• How to make sure your learning content includes people with hearing impairments – article by Susi Miller on LinkedIn
• Take Control – suggestions from the Center for Humane Technology to keep technology working for you. The post includes steps to decrease, mitigate, or exclude technology distractions which can trigger stress and anxiety.
  Please note: the list includes helpful suggestions it does feature links to third-party apps which are not supported by the university. Always read the privacy policy before trying out a new app. It if does not have one then best to avoid it.

Take part

Pledge to make changes over the next month

You can sign up to the pledge on this page and see what other folks have pledged to do this month.

Essentially you are pledging to complete some good deeds, or rather #GAADDeeds this month! For those on Twitter, please consider sharing your pledge on Twitter, as Fiona did here. Here is a new example of a #GAADDeed from this week.

Attend the workshops and online events

As outlined in our events section at the top of this post. More details for the online events are to follow.

Join the Fix Your Content Day Challenge on 20th May

If you are an academic staff person or a professional staff person who creates resources for My Studies you can take part in our entry to this challenge on 20th May. The challenge is to improve as many documents as you/we can in My Studies on the 20th May. There has never been a better day of the year to try the new Ally Accessibility Summary which we enabled for your good selves last week. Sign-up as an individual or as a team using this form.

Fix Your Content Day Challenge is a global competition with other universities using Blackboard Ally and you can see the leaderboard from last year here.