Forbes - Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Plus: Coronavirus Pandemic Reveals Our Economic Inequality

Morning Banter

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day that’s dedicated to promoting digital access and inclusion for people with disabilities. As society increasingly shifts to the virtual realm, one that’s been fueled more recently by physical distancing mandates, digital accessibility has become all the more critical.

Some companies have made strides in creating more disability-friendly technology and accessible digital designs. At Google, the Project Euphonia research team is working to improve voice assistive technology for those with impaired speech, while IBM offers an Equal Access Toolkit that provides designers and developers with some of the tools needed to make their websites and applications accessible for all.

If you aren’t overseeing your company’s accessibility efforts, there are still a number of ways to help people with disabilities take part in the digital world:

1) Enlarge font sizes to assist blind or low-vision users.

2) Provide captions or transcripts for any video or audio.

3) Write descriptions for photos so that screen-readers can narrate the text, especially on social platforms that are media heavy like Instagram.

4) Ensure that your webpage has proper color contrast. Neon green text on a hot pink background is hard to read—even for those with normal visual acuity.

Have some insight? I want to hear from you. Send me an email at rumoh@forbes.com.

Quiz Yourself

About 15% of the world's population lives with some form of disability. That’s roughly how many billion people?

A) 1 billion
B) 5 billion
C) 20 billion
D) 30 billion

(Answer located at the bottom of this newsletter.)

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Up Ahead

• Learn how to caption your media in this accessibility workshop on May 21.
• On May 28, tune in for a discussion on how employee resource groups can drive diversity.

Quiz answer: (A) One billion people, or 15% of the world's population, experience some form of disability.