The Latest From Code Savvy - Appapalooza is this coming weekend!
Appapalooza is Technovation[MN]’s largest event, bringing teams of girls, their mentors, judges, the Minnesota tech community, volunteers, friends, and family together to celebrate, support, and nurture a future diverse technology workforce pipeline.
This year’s event will be hybrid, with the girls pitching their apps virtually in the morning and then all of us coming together in the afternoon at Snail Lake Regional Park from 3-5pm.
We are still in need of volunteers for the afternoon portion of our event… Please take a moment to sign up and please share with your networks!
We would love to celebrate with all of you! ❤️
This Week’s Spotlight and Project-Inspiration Theme: Global Accessibility Awareness Day (Thursday, May 19th)
May 19th is the 11th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)! The purpose of this day is to bring awareness and education to digital access and inclusion to those with disabilities and/or impairments. Since technology is now used for just about everything, every user deserves to have a positive experience when it comes to the internet. There are over 1 billion people across the world with different impairments or disabilities, ranging from visual, hearing, motor, cognitive, and more. Learn more about GAAD on their website and find out how you can participate in activities, initiatives, or projects to help share the importance of digital accessibility.
A study done in 2021 by WebAIM, an organization to help ‘expand the potential of the web for people with disabilities by empowering individuals and organizations to create accessible content’, found that 98.1% of different sites' home pages had at least one WCAG 2.0 Failure. They also found that on average there are around 60.9 failures on just the homepages alone of many websites. Most of these failures come from low contrast text, missing image alt text, and empty links.
To see how important digital accessibility is, try doing an experiment with the different accessibility tools on your cell phone. Use this link to learn how to use VoiceOver, a gesture-based screen reader on iPhone and iPad that gives audible descriptions of what's on your screen. Once you turn it on try to navigate your phone solely using VoiceOver, testing out different basic functions of your phone or going into your favorite apps. This is one of the many great examples of how technology can help improve digital access for all.