😅 Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

It has been quite the month! My team and I, alongside our network of Accessibility Champions, decided to go all-in on this year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). We put on:

• an internal conference, broadcast live to our colleagues world-wide from our head office
• an accessibility empathy lab with 15 workstations

And I’m currently on the train back from Manchester, having run a pop-up empathy lab and given a talk at Natter.

You’ll be glad to hear that I also found time to get on my high-horse about accessibility overlays: Accessibility overlays are not for disabled people.

From the archives

I had a chat with someone this morning about abbreviations and acronyms. A friend of theirs is autistic and has bother extrapolating an abbreviation out to its full word, for example “info” being shorthand for “information”. We discussed the best way to remove this barrier, which reminded me of an article I wrote a couple of years ago about how abbreviations can be problematic.

Elsewhere on the web

Here are some of the more interesting bits and bobs from around the web that I read (and one or two that I re-read) during May:

• Oh Sh*t, My App is Successful and I Didn’t Think About Accessibility
• Conducting Accessibility Research In An Inaccessible Ecosystem
• Apple announces new accessibility features
• A guide to understanding what makes a typeface accessible
• How icons are ruining interfaces

Anyway, after all the GAAD shenanigans I’m looking forward to a more low-key June; catch you again in a month’s time! 😴