Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2022

Today is the 11th Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which aims to encourage conversations around digital access and inclusion. With over 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide, digital products must be accessible to everyone.

What is digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility involves making web-based services, content and other digital products easily accessible. This means all users with a disability should be able to access these products as easily as users without disabilities.

Within digital accessibility sits web accessibility, which focuses on websites and the technologies associated with them. The Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI), as part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), publishes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): an internationally recognised set of recommendations to improve web accessibility.

Raising awareness of these standards across digital and web-based products helps us think more about how we can improve our services and remove any accessibility barriers.

What digital adaptations are available?

There are a number of ways to make digital products more accessible for people with impairments:

• Visual – Screen reader software helps people with visual impairments translate visual information into descriptive text.
• Hearing – Captioning for videos and visual indicators to replace audio cues can make video content more accessible for people with hearing impairments.
• Motor – People with motor impairments benefit from using adaptive hardware such as alternative keyboards or eye control to help them use devices.
• Cognitive – People living with cognitive impairments such as dementia can benefit from clear language, simple fonts and clear navigation online.

What is Brunelcare doing to be more accessible?

At Brunelcare we are committed to increasing digital accessibility across the charity and are working towards making all digital services easily accessible to our customers.

We are in the process of building a brand-new Brunelcare website, which will create a better user experience for all customers. Accessibility is a key consideration in this, and as part of the project, our marketing team has undertaken website accessibility training with accreditation from W3C. The knowledge gained through this accessibility accreditation means we can guarantee WCAG 2.1 compliance and make the new website easy for all users to navigate.

Gemma Williams, Head of Marketing, Communications and Customer Engagement, said: “Accessibility is at the forefront of our mind at Brunelcare, and we care about making sure customers can easily access our products and services online. We look forward to making this happen with the launch of our new website.”