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Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2023

 I was fortunate enough to be invited as a panellist for GenU's inaugural webinar for the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. 

The GAAD aims to raise awareness and promote global accessibility for people with disabilities in the digital space.

We are all aware that in the developed world physical access to the community is a human right but we now live in an increasingly digital space with most of us living a big chunk of our lives online. 

This can either be more empowering for the disability community or sometimes disempowering depending on how much thought the technology companies put into accessibility to their digital products. 

I personally have used the digital world to increase my independence since the early nineties. I was the youngest person in the southern hemisphere to use Dragon Naturally Speaking, the voice dictation software, that first came out. I still use the software to this day and supplement it with other voice recognition programs such as Apple's Siri and the microphone app in google search. 

The pandemic had a surprising benefit in terms of digital accessibility for people with disabilities with the rapid adoption of things like video conferencing, webinars, and online education. For me and other people with disabilities these technologies increase our earning capacity. 

Also the adoption of more text to voice coding embedded in government websites has made it easier to navigate the internet and find the information I need to. I would encourage all companies and website builders to make this an automatic feature of your websites.

Podcasts and social media platforms have also increased my ability to independently access.

On this Global Accessibility Awareness Day I encourage everybody to adopt a universal access mindset because if the world is more accessible to people with disabilities then it is accessible to everyone. 

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