Public Procurement and Property

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

May 16, 2024 by Teigan Kelly No Comments | Category Accessibility, Best practice, Scottish Procurement

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

Today (16 May) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of the day, is to raise knowledge and awareness about creating accessible content and to learn what you can do to help remove accessibility barriers.

One of our outcomes for public procurement in Scotland is to be #OpenAndConnected.

To be open, we aim to create digital accessible content that provides all users with access to the same information, regardless of any impairments they may have. To celebrate GAAD, we wanted to reflect on some of the measures we have been taking over the past few years to make our digital content as accessible as possible.

Over the past few years, our team have made it a priority to produce and share accessible content through several different ways. We have done this by:

• changing the look and formatting of our Scottish Procurement Policy Notes (SPPN) and Construction Policy Notes (CPN) – removing unnecessary colouring, reducing sentence length and aligning with Scottish Government style guide to adapt our formatting to be as accessible as possible
• adding voiceovers to all animations we share to help those with sight impairments
• adding subtitles and transcripts to all of our videos we share
• adding alt text to all images we share in blogs and social media posts
• ensuring appropriate colour contrast levels in graphics and videos
• ensuring links are conveyed by more than colour (underlined and can easily be determined)
• attending a range of accessibility training sessions to expand our knowledge further and share best practice with our colleagues

The Scottish Government’s website provides an accessibility statement explaining how we continually aim to develop our processes to ensure accessibility for all. 

We encourage all content creators to find out more about making content accessible as every user should get the same experience online with or without impairments. There are several online and in person events run by GAAD organisation this year, providing an excellent opportunity to learn more about the importance of accessibility.

For further information on public procurement in Scotland please visit www.gov.scot/procurement

Please email enquiries to scottishprocurement@gov.scot

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Tags: accessibility, GAAD, Scottish Procurement

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