Every May, the accessibility community marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day — a moment to get the world talking about digital access and inclusion. This year, GAAD falls on Thursday, May 21, 2026, and it’s a milestone: the 15th anniversary of a day that, fittingly, started with a single blog post.
I want to tell you what GAAD means to me. Not as a statistic. Not as a compliance checkbox. But as someone who uses Assistive Technology (AT) for digital devices and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) to speak, who navigates the world in a wheelchair, and who has spent years working as a certified accessibility professional, testing whether the digital world actually works for people like me. Spoiler: it often doesn’t. And I can prove it.
What Is Global Accessibility Awareness Day?
GAAD was born in 2011 from an idea by Los Angeles-based web developer Joe Devon and LinkedIn accessibility professional Jennison Asuncion. What began as a community call to action has grown into a global event with workshops, pledges, and conversations across industries and continents on the third Thursday of every May.
The GAAD Foundation, launched in 2021 to mark the day’s 10th anniversary, describes its mission simply: to disrupt the culture of technology and digital product development to make accessibility a core requirement—not an afterthought.
This year’s theme is “Design, Develop, Deliver”- a call to weave accessibility into every stage of building digital experiences, not bolt it on at the end. That theme lands differently when you live it every day.
The Internet Is Supposed to Be the Great Equalizer. It Isn’t.
The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 1.3 billion people globally live with a significant disability-roughly 16% of the world’s population. The internet promised to be the great equalizer: a space where physical barriers dissolve, where geography doesn’t matter, where someone who communicates differently can still access banking, healthcare, education, news, and connection.
That promise has not been kept.
The annual WebAIM Million report-the most comprehensive audit of web accessibility conducted each year- paints a sobering picture. In its 2025 analysis of the top one million website homepages:
- 94.8% of homepages had at least one detectable WCAG failure.
- The average homepage contained 51 distinct accessibility errors, meaning an AT user encounters a barrier on roughly 1 out of every 24 elements.
- 79.1% of homepages had low-contrast text—the single most common barrier year after year.
- 55.5% of images lacked alt text, leaving screen reader users without context for over half of the web’s visual content.
I audited websites professionally. I audited the California Courts website against WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards and found exactly what these numbers predict: a patchwork of barriers that don’t announce themselves until you’re already blocked. Missing form labels. Keyboard traps.
Poor color contrast. Images with no alternative text. These aren’t exotic edge cases. They are the default state of the web.
For many people, a bad contrast ratio is annoying. For me and others who depend on assistive technology-screen readers, switch access, AAC devices, eye gaze systems, voice control- these barriers aren’t inconveniences. They are walls.
What “Inaccessible” Actually Feels Like
Let me be concrete, because numbers land harder when they are grounded in lived experience. I think people understand data better when they can feel it.
I use AT and AAC to communicate. That means I rely on apps, devices, and interfaces to produce speech for me. When a website requires me to interact with a button with no accessible label, a video player with no keyboard controls, or a form that auto-advances fields faster than my device can keep up, I cannot complete the task. Period.
I don’t mean it’s harder. I mean, it’s impossible.
Now imagine that this happens on your healthcare portal when you’re trying to message your doctor. Or on the government website where you’re trying to renew a benefit. Or on the pharmacy app where you’re managing a prescription. Or on the job application site where you’re trying to apply for a job
This is not hypothetical for me. This is Tuesday. I have written about this firsthand in the Closing The Gap Solutions Magazine. I co-authored an article with Tiffany Wilson of Wilson Inclusive Solutions on how people with mobility and speech disabilities navigate their digital lives using assistive technology. The throughline of that work — and everything I do — is that the tools exist to make access possible. What fails is the will to design for it from the start.
Why GAAD Matters — Especially This Year
GAAD 2026 is the 15th anniversary. Fifteen years of talking about this. Fifteen years of awareness campaigns, of toolkits, of webinars, of pledges. And we’re still at 94.8% failure.
I don’t say that to be discouraging. I say it because awareness without accountability changes too little, too slowly, and won’t close a gap this wide. The gap between knowing what accessibility is and building it into every product, every hire, and every procurement decision is still enormous.
This year’s “Design, Develop, Deliver” theme is a challenge to close that gap. It’s asking developers to stop treating accessibility like a final checklist item before a product ships at the end of a sprint. It’s asking designers to build with disabled users—not just for them. It’s asking organizations to deliver on promises they’ve been making for more than a decade. As a CPACC-certified accessibility professional, I work every day in the space between policy and practice. I test products. I audit sites. I write reports that show, in specific technical terms, exactly where something fails and exactly what it would take to fix it. The fixes are almost never impossible. They are almost always prioritization decisions.
Nothing About Us Without Us
There’s a phrase that runs through disability advocacy like a spine: “Nothing about us without us.” It means: don’t design systems for disabled people without including disabled people in the process.
I submitted a session proposal to the AT Conference this year titled exactly that—”Nothing About Us Without Us: Accessibility Testing and AAC from the Inside Out”—because I believe that the most valuable accessibility testing is done by people who use these technologies to live their lives. Not just as subjects of research, but as testers, evaluators, authors, advocates, and experts.
The AAC community has been saying this for years. The 2025 special issue of the Augmentative and Alternative Communication journal centered AAC users as authors -their own voices, their own research, their own frameworks. I’ve been summarizing several of those articles for the Northwest Augmentative Communication Society (NWACS) blog, and what strikes me every time is how much expertise lives in lived experience. That expertise is systematically excluded when accessibility is treated as a technical checklist rather than a human rights commitment.
How to Participate in GAAD 2026
GAAD is not a spectator sport. It’s an invitation to act. Here’s what you can do – whether you’re a developer, designer, educator, or someone who has never thought about accessibility before:
Learn something. GAAD 2026’s official virtual event runs May 21, featuring a keynote from Dr. Shanna Kattari titled “At the Intersection of Access and Justice” – exploring how disability justice challenges institutions to move beyond compliance. Registration is free, and the content is built for all experience levels.
Test your website. Run your site through the WAVE tool (wave.webaim.org) for a free automated accessibility check. start with color contrast, alt text, form labels, and heading structure.
Hire disabled testers. Automated tools catch roughly 30–40% of accessibility issues. The rest requires human testing — ideally by people who use assistive technology daily. Pay us for that expertise.
Commit to something concrete. The WordPress community is collecting pledges of hours spent on accessibility improvements for GAAD 2026. You don’t need to be a developer to pledge. Write a caption. Add alt text to an old post. Ask your organization what its accessibility roadmap looks like.
Listen to AAC users, wheelchair users, blind and low-vision users, Deaf users, and people with cognitive disabilities about their digital experiences. Not in a focus group designed to check a box. In a genuine partnership where our input shapes what gets built.
What I’m Doing on May 21
I’ll be spending GAAD 2026 the way I spend most days: using my Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) device to communicate, navigating the web with assistive technology (AT) that makes it possible, and running into barriers that shouldn’t exist in 2026.
But I’ll also be writing. Advocating. Sharing the research. Connecting with the community of people who are doing this work — including the NWACS community, the AAC community, and every accessibility professional who is pushing for a web that works for everyone.
If you’ve read this far and you’re not disabled, I want to ask you something directly
What will you change after today? Not what will you learn. What will you change? Because awareness is a starting point. Access is the destination.
Further Reading and Resources
- GAAD Official Website — event listings, history, and resources
- WebAIM Million 2025 Report — the full data behind the numbers above
- WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool — free automated testing
- GAAD Foundation — mission and initiatives
- Accessible Community Official Website — mission and resources
- NWACS Official Website — information and resources on AAC
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