Embracing Accessibility as the Cornerstone of Open Source
The recent findings from the WebAIM Million Project starkly highlight the pivotal role that development frameworks and tools play in shaping the accessibility landscape of digital products. A significant portion of these essential frameworks is rooted in the Open Source community. This represents not only a challenge, but a profound opportunity for transformative change.
The GAAD Pledge aims to be a visionary initiative, collaborating annually with one Open Source project. This project would not only champion the cause but also set a new standard for integrating accessibility at the very heart of open source development.
Once a project is chosen, the GAAD Foundation works with the project’s maintainers to craft a pledge that makes sense for their community.
The GAAD Pledge is a call to action for open-source leaders to embed accessibility at the core of their projects, paving the way for an inclusive digital world where every code contribution opens doors for all.
GAAD Pledge Takers
Intel
This year, Intel and the Open Federated Learning (OpenFL) project are taking the GAAD Pledge to make accessibility a core project value and enable developers of all abilities to effectively contribute to OpenFL’s deep learning framework. Part of OpenFL’s pledge includes adopting the newly launched Intel One Monospace font.
Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, we designed the Intel One Mono typeface for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors.
The third GAAD Pledge was taken by the Drupal project. To celebrate the 11th anniversary of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Drupal has taken the Pledge to reaffirm their commitment to accessibility.
The Drupal community is again celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) but this time we are excited to also announce that the Drupal CMS has taken the GAAD pledge to formalize accessibility as a core value of our framework.
The second GAAD Pledge was taken by the EmberJS project. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Ember has taken the Pledge to make Ember JS accessible.
As we join Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) in celebrating its tenth anniversary, we are delighted to announce that the Ember JavaScript Framework has taken the GAAD pledge to make accessibility a core value of our framework.
Our very first GAAD Pledge was taken by Facebook (now known as Meta). In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2020, Meta took the commitment to making the React Native framework fully accessible. Meta built React Native and made it open source so it could be used and further developed by anyone.
We hope this pledge makes it easier for developers using React Native to create fully accessible mobile apps and inspires other organizations to make similar commitments to a more accessible future.
