Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Join our online event to share your own accessibility achievements or good practice, learn about accessibility wins from across the University and test your practical skills. There are three 30 minute sessions, which you can dip in and out of or book onto all of them below. 

Accessibility Achievements in Teaching and Learning – 1:30pm

Practical Activity: Identify and Fix Accessibility Issues in a Document – 2:00pm 

Showcase of Updates to the University Website – 2:30pm  

To celebrate GAAD, students currently working with the Centre for Academic Development are revamping our student facing web page “Unlocking Inclusivity: Digital Accessibility Skills for Students” with a video and blog posts as well as generating posts for social media. This will showcase how their work with accessibility has impacted their student experience, as well as provide a range of tools and resources to help students learn more about creating accessible content. 

Unlocking Inclusivity: Digital Accessibility Skills for Students 

Blackboard have launched a new series of 5-minute videos on using Ally, designed to help quickly build practical skills for creating accessible and inclusive course materials. The first video on the Course Accessibility Report is now available. 

Between November 2025 – April 2026 Student Intern, Sofiia Prokhorets from the Centre for Academic Development, conducted evaluation of the user experience on MyAberdeen. The feedback is now being shared with schools, was presented at the Annual Academic Symposium and will inform future practices and guidance.  

This Quick Guide on Accessibility of Maths Authoring Tools outlines institutionally available tools available to staff and recommendations that ensure that learning materials are as accessible as they can be. 

Global Accessibility Awareness Day event Thursday 15 May 1-3pm 2025. Join this online event for good practice examples from experienced University Inclusion Practitioners. They will share their personal accounts of helping someone around the topic of accessibility. The session will start with a talk from external company Gordon Morris on helpful hearing products and solutions.

Digital Accessibility Quiz

An opportunity to win a (small!) goodie bag! Test your knowledge of digital accessibility and creating accessible digital content by completing this short quiz.

Start the quiz on digital accessibility

The first person to get all the answers correct will win the goodie bag.

Poster on Digital Accessibility on MyAberdeen

What basic fixes can you make in your course area to help improve digital accessibility? The eLearning team in CAD have summarised the most common issues found. Download the poster below to view! 

Digital Accessibility Poster

School Ally Reports

The eLearning team will be sharing Ally reports with each School to highlight overall accessibility score, what the most common digital accessibility issues are and student usage of Ally alternative formats. 

Accessibility Pledge

Accessibility Success

During GAAD 2024, Dawn Foster from the Research and Innovation team pledged to make their general guidance, ethical guidance documents and templates on the web fully accessible.  Dawn has been working hard to achieve this goal with colleague Mark Williamson.  Their newly formatted documents are available on the Research Governance StaffNet page along with a commitment to ensuring all new documents are also accessible.  Well done on this is a fantastic achievement!

Future Accessibility Pledge for GAAD 2026?

If you would like to make an accessiblity pledge for next year do let us know by emailing us at elearning@abdn.ac.uk.  This could be anything from making documents more accessible, providing alternative formats of resources or changing assessments.

New Toolkit Resources on Digital Accessibility

The Toolkit team have just published a new series of easy-to-follow guides for both creators and consumers of digital content.  Visit Accessibility for Authors/Creators or Accessibility for Users for more from our in-house experts.

In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2023 (GAAD), we ran this event to increase awareness of the importance of digital accessibility and how to ensure your own content is accessible.

The event began was chaired by Jason Bohan and we heard from a range of expert perspectives, including colleagues in Assistive Technology, Training and Documentation Team, The Web Team, The Library and the Centre for Academic Development. The panel discussed improving accessibility for a range of content and strategies for overcoming common accessibility challenges.

A series of short 20 minute workshops deilvered by eLearning, Training and Documentation Team and Assistive Technology on creating accessible content.

One hour session, chaired by Kirsty Kiezebrink, with last year's winner of Fix Your Content Day, Bill Harrison, who discussed how he used this to increase awareness of the importance of digital accessibility and increased staff engagement with the Course Accessibility Report.

We also heard from Samantha May and Martin Barker on their experience taking part in the pilot of the Course Accessibility Service. We also had two students on the panel, Rian-James Hiney and Alannah Comerford who discussed their experience as students with digital accessibility of course learning materials.