Each May, Global Accessibility Awareness Day challenges us to reflect on a profound yet often overlooked question: What does accessibility truly mean in our daily lives? While GAAD began as a call to improve digital access for people with disabilities, it has grown into a wider conversation about equity, dignity, and participation in all aspects of society.
Too often, “awareness” is treated as a box to tick, a themed campaign, or a symbolic gesture. But awareness, when taken seriously, is a practice. It demands curiosity, humility, and the willingness to see the world through someone else’s experience. And it doesn’t end with knowing that accessibility matters; it begins there.
So, what does meaningful awareness look like for the rest of us?
It looks like checking whether your community center has a ramp and asking why not, if it doesn’t. It looks like captioning your videos, not because someone asked you to, but because someone shouldn’t have to. It means designing websites, services, and environments with the assumption that people with all kinds of physical or cognitive abilities will be able to use them and should feel welcome doing so.
It means listening with modesty to people with disabilities as experts of their lives, as opposed to patronizing them or assuming their needs are fringe or niche. One billion people globally live with disabilities. Their access needs are not exceptions.
Global examples of innovation
Their needs are part of the entire global human needs. Universal design ensures that every individual, regardless of their ability, will be able to participate, feel a sense of belonging, and have an equal opportunity to contribute to their community.
Global examples of innovation in accessibility abound, from city-wide wayfinding systems for the visually impaired in Barcelona to sign language-integrated television in Kenya. In Israel, organizations like Beit Issie Shapiro have developed inclusive models that inform national and international policies and promote early education and assistive technologies.
What are we doing locally to remove barriers?
Through a new “Tech for Heroes” program, we are also adapting our assistive technology solutions created initially for people with developmental disabilities to help soldiers wounded in the Israel-Hamas War. This exciting partnership with Restart Global and the Joint Distribution Committee is giving our heroes new ways to reclaim their independence. With each soldier, our work starts with a long and indelible learning curve, which, indeed, increases awareness of what will best help them.
These successes are not endpoints, however. They are prompts: What are we doing locally to remove barriers, amplify voices, and foster belonging?
If we are serious about awareness, we must be serious about change. That starts with asking uncomfortable questions and translating and transforming perceptions into actions, striving for social change – not just once a year, but every day.
The writer is the academic & knowledge resource director at Beit Issie Shapiro, founded Beit Issie’s Inclusive University, and is the editor of the journal ‘Disability & Society – Research & Practice.’ He is the author of Identity of Capability, which addresses learning disabilities and is available in Hebrew and English.
