The third Thursday of May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). Every year, the Office of Accessibility works with agency accessibility coordinators to organize activities on that day to promote the value of accessibility. A popular activity is the No-Mouse Challenge, which encourages employees to do their job for fifteen minutes without touching their computer mouse or trackpad.

This year, we expanded the celebration to the entire week – hosting presentations at a different state location each day over the lunch hour. The topics were:

• Monday: How an enterprise software app, Siteimprove, crawls designated websites for broken links, misspellings, and accessibility issues.
• Tuesday: A case study on how accessibility was “baked into” the planning, design, and development process of Workforce One, a key case worker and services management tool for the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED).
• Wednesday: Guidance on how business analysts (BAs) can integrate accessibility into their processes.
• Thursday: Review of free web page testing tools and how to use them.
• Friday: How to work with updated Microsoft SharePoint templates, called “Modern Pages” to best ensure accessibility

Employees attended in person as well as through webcast. In-person attendees picked up copies of accessibility quick cards (PDF) and phone stands and got to meet the presenters.

An interesting challenge was ensuring full inclusivity at each event. Since they were at different locations, we had to rely on accessibility coordinators and their network and facilities teams to ensure:

• Good quality audio for both the room and webcast
• Reliable internet connection for both the webcast computer and the onsite captioner
• Caption display on both the room screen and webcast view
• Ability to manage slides in room and via webcast

Each of these elements sound simple enough, but collectively they create a situation fraught with numerous pitfalls. No matter how early we started setup, every day preparation continued to the last minute and sometimes past the start time. Fortunately, we were successful every day thanks to the collective efforts of numerous participants!