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June news from JAT (Joomla Accessibility Team)

june-a11y

Joomla! Participation in Global Accessibility Awareness Day

May is an important month for accessibility, every year a community event of great strength is celebrated all over the world: Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is an awareness day focusing on digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people with disabilities and impairments. It is marked annually on the third Thursday of May.

What is the purpose of this event?

A yearly event, organized in many locations worldwide, that aims at raising awareness about accessibility and inclusion, by gathering up together technology experts and disabled people.

The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. Local-Global Accessibility Awareness Day events sometimes showcase how people with disabilities use the web and digital products using assistive technologies, or assist people in creating technology products in taking into consideration the needs of certain disabilities.

Accessibility Day and COVID 19

The Accessibility Days are now in their fourth edition. This year should have been hosted in the Institute of the Blind in Milan, but the emergency health situation forced the organization to carry it out online, in live streaming.

Here is their statement:

'Accessibility is an issue too important to give up and say superficially "oh well, we will talk about Accessibility Days next year". Indeed, precisely in these days of the emergency, if we have a chance to continue to carry out at least part of our activities, which relate to work, study, or to keep in contact with family, friends and the rest of the world, we owe above all to digital technologies, which allow us to carry them out remotely.

As human beings, we have a duty, at least moral, to commit ourselves to ensure that the right to use these digital technologies is guaranteed to everyone. And as Accessibility Days, which purpose is to raise awareness on the issue of accessibility and disabilities for those involved in digital technologies, we certainly cannot back down!'

Italian edition of Accessibility Day and Joomla

 

Joomla! Speakers in the Italian Accessibility Days: Camara, Marzo, Matturro, Disimino

Joomla participated in the 2020 Italian edition with the contribution of The JAT Team Leader Carlos Cámara, our Secretary Luca Marzo, and the JAT members Vito Disimino and Donato Matturro.

Our interventions:

Extending our call for volunteers to the a11y club

Vice President Elisa Foltyn offered to be the liaison with the a11y club to extend our call for volunteers and find more people outside our community. We are providing a blog post so that they can promote it.

The a11y club is an initiative to bring together developers and professional screenreader users. The main objective is to increase A11y awareness among developers and help them to understand the challenges people with disabilities face every day. The Club usually arranges meetups where developers and screenreader users sit together and learn these challenges.

The Accessibility Club gives you the chance to get some real-world experience with assistive technology, deepen your knowledge about web accessibility and get in touch with like-minded web workers

Some articles published on the Joomla Community Magazine represent the personal opinion or experience of the Author on the specific topic and might not be aligned to the official position of the Joomla Project

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