Celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on Thursday 21 May by learning how small digital changes can make a big difference.
It’s Friday evening. After a long week, you open the webpage for a new takeaway place your friend recommended.
You’re ready to choose your meal, but the page is hard to use. The colours are distracting, images are scattered between blocks of text, and there’s no clear way to tell which description matches which dish.
After a few minutes of zooming, scrolling and trying again, you give up. Not because you don’t want the food, but because the page makes it too hard.
Now imagine that happening when you’re trying to access a reading, watch a lecture recording, submit a form or take part in online learning.
For some people, this is not occasional – it is part of everyday life online. That is what GAAD asks us to notice.
What is GAAD?
GAAD is a global day to think about how accessible our digital world really is – and who might be left out. For students, digital accessibility can affect how you:
- access readings and lecture recordings
- use the LMS
- complete online forms
- work on group assignments
- take part in online learning.
When digital content is accessible, it’s easier for more people to use. This includes people with a disability, people using assistive technology, people studying in noisy spaces and people learning in a second language.
Tools and support at La Trobe
There are a range of tools and support at uni to help you access content in ways that work better for you.
You can:
- Use the Ally tool in the LMS to access alternative formats for some course content, including audio, ePub, electronic braille and translated versions. You can find out more on the Ally website.
- Join the Assistive Tech Teams Channel via Teams to access a current list of available technologies, guides for each tool, a chat forum to discuss options and regular updates about new technology.
- Register with Accessibility to get tailored support for your accessibility requirements during your studies.
- If accessibility requirements are impacting your wellbeing, reach out to the Wellbeing team.
Small changes can help everyone
Digital accessibility is often discussed in relation to disability, but accessible design choices can make study better for everyone.
For example:
- Captions and transcripts support deaf and Deaf students, students with auditory processing needs and students learning in a second language. They also help when you’re watching a video somewhere noisy, or somewhere you can’t use sound.
- Clear headings help people using screen readers or keyboards move through a page. They also help you skim readings and find what you need.
- Alt text describes important images, graphs and tables for people who use screen readers. It also helps make sure key information is not missed.
What you can do
You don’t need to be an accessibility expert. When you create slides, documents, videos or group assignment materials, try to:
- use clear headings
- add captions or transcripts where you can
- describe important images, charts and tables
- check your content is easy to read on a phone or laptop.
These changes can help your classmates, your group members and your future self.
Learn more this GAAD
Each year, the GAAD community hosts free global events about digital accessibility. This includes the Accessible does not equal equitable webinar on 20 May and GAAD Conference 2026 on 26 June. Sessions will be recorded if you can’t join live due to the time difference.
You can also check out Deakin University’s Everyday Accessibility Basics for simple changes you can make to your digital content or use WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) to check webpage accessibility and learn how to improve your pages.
This GAAD, the aim is not perfection. It’s noticing what gets in the way, making small improvements and helping to create digital study spaces that work for more people.