Key takeaways:
- Accessibility is at the core of Genio: GAAD was the spark, but Team ACE built a full week of touchpoints to carry that energy across the whole company.
- The week was intentionally structured: Each day had a different theme, moving from engagement and knowledge sharing to hands-on challenges and reflection.
- Designing for disability makes things better for everyone: Captions, voice control, dark mode, all started as accessibility features and are now widely being used.
- The work didn't stop when GAAD week ended: The Lunch and Learn put the whole company in the users' shoes, using disability simulators to make the friction feel real.
- Staying accessible means staying curious: Sites change, frameworks update, and new components ship. Therefore, staying curious is the way forward.
Every third Thursday of May, the global tech community is invited to pause and think about something that should never be an afterthought, whether the digital world we build actually works for everyone who uses it.
This year, Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) fell on 21 May. At Genio, accessibility isn't a campaign or a compliance exercise. It's the reason we exist.
Genio Notes and Genio Present are used every day by over 160,000 students at more than 1,000 institutions worldwide, many of them with dyslexia, ADHD, anxiety, physical disabilities, and other conditions that make traditional note taking and presenting a significant barrier. Building tools that work for them, properly and verifiably, is the whole point. If you want the full picture of what that looks like in practice, Alice's recent piece on our WCAG journey is the place to start, and our compliance announcement sets out exactly where we stand.
But this year, Team ACE (our small working group of Accessibility champions and experts mobilised to support the rest of the company with WCAG standards and accessibility queries), wanted to do something more. Rather than let the day pass with a Slack post, we wanted everyone at Genio to actually feel it.
So we spent a week on it.
Monday: Starting the conversation
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) started in 2011 with a single blog post. A developer called Joe Devon asked his peers to think about accessibility for just one day a year. Fifteen years on, it's grown into a global moment. Find out more here.
We wanted to honour that spirit by meeting people where they were, in Slack, over lunch, and during the all-hands meeting. The week kicked off with a simple message of sharing insights throughout the week, including some myth-busting, essential tools to bookmark, and a couple of small challenges. It wasn't meant to be heavy, it was simply an invitation to notice things you might normally overlook.
Tuesday: Knowledge sharing
A lot of features people use every day started as accessibility features.
Closed captions were designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community before they became everyone's default way to watch TikTok with the sound off. SMS was shaped in part by Deaf users who needed a text-based way to communicate. Voice control was pioneered for people with motor impairments long before Siri or Alexa made it mainstream. Dark mode helps people with light sensitivity, and has since become a default preference for millions of others.
And dropped kerbs (those small ramps at street corners) were fought for by wheelchair users in the 70s. Now they help anyone with a pushchair, a suitcase, or a delivery trolley. There's a name for this, it’s called the kerb-cut effect. Designing for disability tends to make things better for everyone. That's kind of the whole point of GAAD.
Wednesday: Tools worth knowing
Wednesday's post was more practical, it included a few tools worth bookmarking regardless of role.
The WebAIM Contrast Checker allows you to paste in two colours and instantly determines if the text is readable. axe DevTools is a free browser extension that scans any webpage for accessibility issues. Furthermore, the screen readers built into every Mac and Windows machine are worth exploring, try VoiceOver on Mac (Cmd+F5) or Narrator on Windows (Ctrl+Win+Enter).
The resulting thread was encouraging. One of our developers replied, stating they had been using VoiceOver regularly and found it "quite fascinating as a dev." Someone else suggested that the week's posts could be compiled into a blog article. And so, here we are.
Thursday: The challenge and the keyboard test
GAAD day itself had two things running in parallel.
Steve from the ACE team launched a short interactive challenge consisting of five tasks designed to let people experience using assistive technology firsthand. Rather than just reading or watching a video, participants engaged with keyboard navigation, screen reader use, and voice control. The response in Slack was warm, although at least one person admitted to "a bit of a Voice Control fail," which is an entirely reasonable first-attempt outcome and likely the most educational moment of the exercise.
Meanwhile, the keyboard-only challenge went out which prompted the team to spend ten minutes navigating one website using only a keyboard. No mouse, no trackpad. Tab forward, Shift+Tab back, Enter to select.
People were asked to pick something familiar. The more familiar the site, the more revealing the exercise. They already knew where everything should be, so friction showed up immediately when things weren't reachable.
Several people independently chose Gmail and returned with the same observation. Focus is frequently lost, and when it does appear, it is inconsistent across different parts of the product. Support pages use hover states without focus rings, one product area uses a ring that respects OS settings, and another features its own animated styling entirely. These represent three different approaches within the same product family, none of which are predictable. For people who rely on keyboard navigation every day, this unpredictability is not just a minor annoyance, it is a significant barrier.
Friday: Connecting the dots
Because Thursday's observations were valuable, Friday's post asked people to share one thing that had resonated with them during the keyboard challenge whether it was a site that handled navigation beautifully, a button that was unreachable, or a focus indicator that vanished when it was needed most.
The reason for collecting these insights is simple. Patterns only emerge when there are enough dots to connect. One person hitting a dead end on a checkout flow is an anecdote; five people hitting dead ends on five different checkout flows is a signal. That is where useful conversations begin.
It is also a reminder that accessibility is not a box to tick once and forget. Sites change, frameworks update, and new components ship; therefore, yesterday's working pattern can quietly break overnight. Staying accessible requires staying curious.
The numbers
During the company all-hands on GAAD, the team shared what had been achieved over the past year. The headline is that Genio Notes (web) and Genio Present are now fully WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 Level AA compliant. This was verified by third-party auditor Level Access and achieved ahead of the official 2027/2028 regulatory deadline. To reach this goal, 170 bugs were fixed: 98 in Genio Notes web, 30 in Genio Present, and many others across mobile platforms, totalling over 200 issues addressed during the audit cycle.
It's a number worth sitting with. And as the compliance announcement puts it: "Accessibility isn't a deadline. It's a standard." The work doesn't stop with a certificate.
Keeping the momentum
GAAD week was over, but the work wasn't. The Monday post rounded up the best places to go next for anyone who wanted to keep the momentum going.
For a starting point, The A11Y Project is the friendliest entry on the internet. The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit is a short, beautifully written guide that reframes accessibility as designing for the full range of human ability. The "persona spectrum" framing alone is worth the click.
To go deeper, WCAG's quick reference is the source of truth that auditors, lawyers, and procurement teams point to. Inclusive Components by Heydon Pickering offers opinionated walkthroughs of how to build common UI patterns so they actually work for everyone. Smashing Magazine's accessibility section is good for keeping current.
For those who'd rather watch or listen: Google's Web Accessibility course on Udacity is free and solid, and the A11y Rules podcast is a good listen for a commute.
None of it needs to be worked through in full. Pick one. Skim it. That's more than most people ever do.
The Lunch and Learn: Walking a mile in our users' shoes
The week's activities extended into the following Thursday, when Team ACE ran a company Lunch and Learn with a simple brief: Walk a mile in our users' shoes.
Rather than simply lecturing for an hour, the session immersed participants in the experience. There were four scenarios based on real Genio Notes and Genio Present use cases, each designed around a student with a specific disability. One scenario involved reviewing a lecture and using the QuizMe feature using only a keyboard. Another simulated the experience of a hard-of-hearing student recording a lecture with the sound off, relying entirely on closed captions. A third asked people to navigate a transcript with the reading difficulty simulator enabled. Finally, the fourth scenario had people step into the shoes of a dyslexic student practising a presentation in Genio Present, using the live transcript as an autocue and assessing the fairness of the feedback received.
For those attending in person, there were physical simulators set up around the office too like blurred-vision goggles, a tinnitus audio simulation, dexterity gloves to mimic reduced hand control, and props simulating a broken arm. These weren't gimmicks. The point was to make abstract accessibility categories feel immediate and personal.
When asked to summarise the session in one or two words, participants chose: frustrated, difficult, challenging, stressful, and anxious, but also interesting, grateful, fortunate, and empathy-creating. One person noted that they "found it really hard to maintain patience to get somewhere with the keyboard rather than just using my mouse," adding that the blurred goggles had an unexpected benefit, they could still track colour movement on the screen to orient themselves. Small observations like these are exactly what the session was designed to surface.
Accessibility is a practice, not a project. That was the note the session closed on, with a prompt for everyone to take one personal commitment back to their desk with them.
GAAD only happens once a year, but the day itself is not the point. What matters most is the work that continues afterward: Checking contrast before shipping, adding a caption because it takes thirty seconds, or tabbing through a feature to see if it holds up.
The question worth carrying into every sprint, design review, and piece of content is: Could someone using a screen reader, a keyboard, or who has low vision get the same value out of this? That single question, asked honestly, accomplishes more than any checklist ever will.
Thanks to everyone who joined in this year, whether completing the challenge, trying the keyboard exercise, or just lurking and reading along. It all counts.
To learn more about Genio's accessibility standards, ACRs, and compliance documentation, visit our accessibility and compliance page.
