Ahoy there! Thursday, May 15, 2025, marked the 14th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)! I must admit I had not head of this before and didn’t see much about it in my LinkedIn feed!

The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. The GAAD Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is ‘to disrupt the culture of technology and digital product development to include accessibility as a core requirement.’ Check out the GAAD Foundation website for more info.

Digital accessibility refers to the ability of people with disabilities/impairments to independently consume and/or interact with digital (e.g., web, mobile) applications and content. This is a big deal for users who are physically impaired, who use screen readers or who have other hidden disabilities that affect how they interact with digital. According to the Accessibility Day website, it is estimated that one billion people worldwide have disabilities. They say that, from both a civil rights and a business perspective, people with disabilities are underserved by today’s digital products.

How common
is a lack of
accessibility
in 2025?

WebAIM’s ‘The WebAIM Million’ gives a current snapshot of trends and issues regarding web accessibility. For the seventh consecutive year, WebAIM conducted an accessibility evaluation of the home pages for the top one million websites. According to WebAIM’s report, 96% of all errors detected fall into just six categories:

WCAG Failure Type	% of home pages that fail
Low contrast text	79.1%
Missing alternative text for images	55.5%
Missing form input labels	48.2%
Empty links	45.4%
Empty buttons	29.6%
Missing document language	15.8%

These most common errors have been the same for the last 5 years. Addressing just these few types of issues would significantly improve accessibility across the web. Some of these issues can be easy to fix. I followed the checklist and was able to get a 100% Score in the ‘Accessibility’ rating in Google’s Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights tools.

There are many overlapping areas between SEO and Web accessibility. I even worked on a project more than 20 years ago while in E-Learning that retrofitted old courses to make them compliant with the US Government’s Section 508 requirements, so I knew this was going to be easy. Boom, there was my 100 out of 100 score! Great job! I’m covered in terms of Accessibility. Box ticked!

Not so fast. Although 100% is always good. It’s not good enough. My website wouldn’t pass the criteria set out by the European Commission for the upcoming European Accessibility Act. I have to fix that too! This is a directive that aims to improve the functioning of the internal market for accessible products and services, by removing barriers created by divergent rules in Member States. Companies that don’t comply will be hit by fines and other legal issues. I haven’t seen much about this on LinkedIn either!

What should companies do now? The new European Accessibility Act. regulations are coming into effect soon. Businesses need to figure out if they’re impacted, and if they are, they should get moving on making sure they’re compliant by June 28, 2025.

I was at Brighton SEO this year and had the pleasure to bump into Clive Loseby in the pub (Brighton SEO Day 1 After Party). Clive is the founder of Access by Design. He is a recognised authority on digital accessibility for disabled people and is a passionate speaker about the subject. He spoke at Day 2 of the conference and really opened my eyes to the reality of accessibility issues on websites.

I can run a website through a series of tools to give an indication of whether a web page is ‘accessible’ or not, but apparently these tools are merely a starting point if you are going to assess a website correctly. These tools may pick up a percentage of any accessibility issues but what about the full picture? Clive’s company, Access by Design, works with disabled people when they audit a website. Clive’s experience has shown that it is only by involving disabled people that you can get a true understanding of all the issues.

So if you need your ‘My Website is Accessible’ box checked for the upcoming European Accessibility Act., I can help with that. If you are serious about accessibility for your website, it’s probably best to get the professionals to help you. Check out Access by Design.