This Thursday 15th May 2025, we’re celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) — a day that shines a spotlight on digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people worldwide with disabilities.
At YUDU, we believe that accessible design is better design — for everyone. GAAD is an opportunity not only to reflect on the barriers some users face, but to actively raise awareness, improve digital experiences, and build a more inclusive world.
We’re proud to support our customers in making their digital publications more accessible, and we’re encouraging all YUDU Publisher users to take part. Here are six ways you and your team can mark GAAD and make a difference:
Every publication created on YUDU Publisher includes an automatically generated plain text version — but this is just the foundation. To bring it up to WCAG 1.0 AAA standards, you’ll need to manually enhance it by:
This improved version becomes a vital alternative for users who rely on assistive technology like screen readers or require simplified layouts for cognitive ease.
YUDU Publisher has several key features designed with accessibility in mind:
Test these features yourself and encourage your team to explore how your publication performs for users with different needs.
Accessibility begins at the source. By creating content with accessibility in mind, you’ll make the whole publishing process easier and more inclusive. Here’s how to get started:
Making these small but crucial changes upstream will result in far more accessible digital publications.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into effect in June 2025, introducing new legal obligations for digital content creators across the EU.
Now is the time to familiarise yourself with the requirements and implications. If your organisation distributes digital publications within the EU, you’ll likely need to demonstrate compliance. This means reviewing your current content, testing your output, and understanding how tools like YUDU Publisher support your accessibility journey.
Why not mark GAAD by organising a short accessibility review session with your team?
Creating this internal awareness goes a long way in embedding accessibility into your team’s workflow.
A simple but powerful activity: challenge your team to work without a mouse for an hour or two. Rely solely on the keyboard to navigate websites and your own digital publications.
This small act of empathy can reveal just how inaccessible many digital experiences are when mouse-free navigation isn’t considered — and will highlight the value of keyboard shortcuts and accessible design.
Other ideas include:
Accessibility is a shared responsibility, and at YUDU we continue to enhance the platform so that customers can publish content that meets rising expectations and evolving standards.
We’re currently developing a feature that will allow you to convert your publication into an audio version — making content more accessible for blind and partially sighted users, and offering a flexible format for users who prefer to listen.
With the European Accessibility Act coming into effect next month, our Developers have been hard at work enhancing the YUDU Publisher platform to align to these new requirements. Work is now complete on our web and iOS interfaces, and we are putting the finishing touches on the Android version.
This Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we invite all YUDU Publisher customers to take one step forward — whether it’s enhancing a text version, exploring the platform’s accessibility features, or reflecting on how content is created. Inclusion starts with intention.