Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is on May 15, 2025 and is an opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of digital accessibility – the design of digital products and services to ensure they can be used by as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. To celebrate and spread the word, download and use a GAAD Zoom background
A key aspect of digital accessibility is ensuring that the content we create including webpages, documents, listserv content, and apps are easy to navigate, have clear and readable text, and have features that are usable by all.
Over the past three years, USC has made great strides in improving the accessibility of our digital footprint. We have added the ability to scan all websites for accessibility concerns with automated intelligence, completed manual accessibility testing of websites, adopted an accessibility standard to guide us in best practices, remediated multiple websites, collaborated with Cybersecurity, Procurement, and IT offices to procure accessible content, host weekly open office hours with our Technical Remediation Coordinator, and we collectively continue to work diligently to increase awareness and provide education about digital accessibility throughout the Trojan family.
In an effort to continue the awareness and education the Office of Institutional Accessibility and ADA Compliance has compiled a few webinars & resources that will be occurring for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Interested in more information? Try implementing some of our Top Tips.
Webinars & Resources
- Learn more about available webinars, trainings, and workshops in the OIA Event Calendar. We will continuously update the calendar with new offerings.
- With so many ways to celebrate, visit the official GAAD website for an exhaustive list of events where you can learn, explore, and grow your awareness!
- Faculty interested in the student accommodation process can view a pre-recorded 20 minute moderated discussion with USC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and the Office of Student Accessibility Services’ in An Introduction to the Student Accommodation Process at USC.
Top Tips
To mark GAAD, USC’s Office of Institutional Accessibility and ADA Compliance (OIA) is sharing six top tips to ensure that your digital content is more accessible.
- Use the accessibility checker in Microsoft products to identify and repair accessibility issues.
- Click “Check Accessibility” in the “Review” tab on the toolbar.
- Clicking an item in the checker’s “Inspection Results” highlights the corresponding item in the document and displays an Additional Information section with information on how to fix the issue.
- Add alternative text to an image to help users who are unable to see the image.
- Right-click on the image and select “Edit Alt Text,” then enter the appropriate alternative text in the field that appears in the Alt Text sidebar.
- Alt text should describe the content as well as the context of the image.
- If the image is decorative, leave the field blank and check “Mark as decorative.”
- Select videos that already include closed captioning. When creating your own content, add closed captioning to all uploaded videos.
- Captions are essential for those who are deaf or hard of hearing and also important if a user is unable to listen to the audio or if the audio is unclear.
- If using artificial intelligence (AI) to caption (e.g., the built-in auto-caption capability in YouTube or Facebook), know that auto-captions are only accurate 85% of the time. It is important to ensure accuracy by reviewing the content and editing any AI captions as needed prior to posting your video.
- Learn more about providing accessible captions from WebAim.org.
- Check your PDF’s for accessibility before distributing.
- When using Adobe Acrobat Pro, open your document and select the Tools tab.
- Select the accessibility icon [ ] along the right hand side of the screen.
- Select “Accessibility Check” and “Start Checking”.
- Review the Accessibility Checker’s issue list and remediate as necessary.
- To learn how to remediate PDF’s visit Trojan Learn’s Digital Accessibility Training Page and view the Accessible PDF’s short course review.
- Sending emails, especially through listservs? Create accessible emails using appropriate design, images, graphics, and composition.
- Subject lines should not be more than 50 characters in length and should be descriptive.
- Use bullets or numbered lists instead of creating your own.
- Use appropriate Header structure from the Styles tool in the toolbar.
- Avoid placing text in graphics and always show text in graphics as plain text in the body of the email.
- Readability requires use of fonts such as Tahoma, Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman with a minimum font size of 12 pts.
- Make good use of white space and limit, or even eliminate, use of emojis.
- Unsure of what to do? Know who to contact for digital accessibility help.
- The most important thing to know in digital accessibility is whom to contact when you don’t have the answers. The Digital Accessibility Program at USC is here to help. Email us at Digital Accessibility Program.
Simple Practices
Wanting more tips and tricks? There are additional simple practices you can do to ensure that your content is digitally accessible.
- Use descriptive hyperlinks. To create a descriptive hyperlink make sure your links describe your reader’s destination. Links with a long list of code (numbers/letters) or phrases like “click here” or “learn more” make it difficult for individuals to understand where the link will take them.
- To create a descriptive hyperlinks from a copy-and-pasted URL (in a Microsoft product):
- Copy the URL from your web browser and paste into your document where you want it to appear.
- Right click on the URL and select “Edit Hyperlink.”
- At the top in the “Text to Display” bar, type your descriptive text and click “OK.”
- The descriptive text will appear in place of the URL.
- To add a descriptive hyperlink to existing text:
- Copy the URL from your web browser then go to your Microsoft document.
- Highlight the text you wish to link from, right-click, and select “Hyperlink.”
- In the Address bar, right-click and paste the URL you copied, then click “OK.”
- The text is now linked to that URL.
- To create a descriptive hyperlinks from a copy-and-pasted URL (in a Microsoft product):
Learn More About Digital Accessibility
- Go deeper on digital accessibility with Trojan Learn trainings with the Seven Core Skills of Digital Accessibility series including Tables, Lists, Captions, Alt Text, Headers and Structure, and Descriptive Links.
- You can also download one of OIA’s useful accessibility cheat sheets.
- If you have further questions about digital accessibility, please email accessibility@usc.edu.
Share on Social Media
The OIA encourages you to take any or all of these actions and post your results on social media using the hashtags #GAAD or #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay!
Remember to be accessible use CamelCase, descriptive links, alternative text for photos, and captions for your videos in all your Social Media posts.