Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) – a recap of celebrations in India

Wow, this year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) was bigger than ever before; so it is difficult for me to write full recap in one post; hence this post focuses on what has happened in India and next post will talk about events around the world.

My day started off with event at PayPal India. It’s great to have spoken at an office that I worked earlier. It’s amazing to see some of the initiatives that I have started at PayPal India like Accessibility session for new hires, Accessibility Showcase are continued. Phani, Director of Payment products welcomed the gathering; he has done a good research on accessibility for his talk. Then I spoke about Accessibility of Digital Payments. Then Nawaz Khan of PayPal spoke about JavaScript and Accessibility of other frameworks. Post that Prakash of PayPal has spoken about design for accessibility. Whole event was amazingly moderated by my good friend Shalini Subramanian of PayPal. It was great to meet a lot of old colleagues. Appreciciate PayPal for taking the momentum forward.

Then we have proceeded to NIMHANS Convention Centre to participate in Global Accessibility Awareness day hosted by Prakat Solutions, CIS and Mitra Jyothi sponsored by Informatica and a few others. Event started off with a developer workshop by Nawaz Khan of PayPal, followed by panel discussion around impact of accessible websites and apps, how organizations can play a role. Event has also seen a few cultural events, stories of people as how accessibility and technology ha played a role, event has concluded with a presentation from Sean Murphy on Accessibility at Cisco.

Other events took place in India were Aubergine Solutions Pvt Ltd of Ahmadabad has hosted a workshop on Basics of Web Accessibility. Deque India has hosted a GAAD event at Hyderabad in partnership with NASSCOM Foundation. Radio Udaan has hosted a panel discussion on accessibility that talked about not only digital things but also other areas. BarrierBreak has released a CSS Accessibility Checker.

Here is my playlist of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. If you know of any videos of GAAD, do bring it to my attention and I’ll add them to my playlist.