Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) takes place each year on the third Thursday of May. Since its launch in 2012, inspired by conversations between web developer Joe Devon and accessibility advocate Jennison Asuncion, it has encouraged wider awareness of digital accessibility and the barriers people encounter when using digital products and services.
Accessibility conversations in hospitality often begin with the physical experience. Entry. Movement. Bedrooms. Bathrooms. Service.
For guests, hospitality begins long before arrival.
It begins with discovery, research, booking, confirmation, communication.
A hotel may have accessible bedrooms, thoughtful design, and well-trained teams, but if the journey to reach them creates barriers, accessibility has already become part of the experience.
Digital exclusion can be easy to overlook because many hospitality businesses rely on systems they did not design. Booking engines, reservation platforms, payment journeys, apps, and more.
Operational familiarity makes friction invisible.
For colleagues, hospitality increasingly depends on digital systems to recruit, communicate, train, organise, and manage its workforce.
Applications are submitted online. Training is delivered digitally. Rotas are managed through platforms. Payroll is accessed electronically. Internal communication is often buried inside software.
For colleagues encountering barriers within those systems, accessibility shapes working life as much as workplace culture.
Accessibility barriers often remain unseen until described by those who encounter them.
A booking process that appears intuitive may be unusable with assistive technology.
A recruitment platform intended to streamline hiring may quietly exclude capable applicants.
Digital accessibility can easily be viewed as a specialist discipline, something for developers, designers, or systems providers to consider.
Hospitality is defined by experience.
If experience is the measure, digital accessibility belongs firmly within hospitality thinking.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day raises useful questions.
Where does accessibility begin?
Which barriers remain unseen?
Whose experiences are absent from discussion?
Accessibility understanding continues to evolve.
Hospitality evolves constantly through technology, expectation, and changing ways of working.
Accessibility understanding should evolve with it.
GAAD offers a reminder that some of the most important accessibility conversations may begin in places hospitality has not traditionally looked at as first point of guest experience.
Not at the front door or reception.
Much earlier, on a monitor or mobile screen.
Inspired by GAAD, and by conversations at The aha Mediterranean Forum, digital accessibility is a subject now being explored further at The aha Forum, in Partnership with Thomas Franks, taking place next month at Barings in the City of London.