Khan Academy recently published a recap of its Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) celebration, written by Elizabeth Barker, Senior Technical Program Manager for Accessibility. You can read the full article here: The Duality of May: Why Global Accessibility Awareness Day Hits Differently.
As many of you know, I joined Khan Academy as an Assistive Technology Specialist late last year, and this was my first GAAD with the team. I want to tell you about the part I played, because it speaks to something I believe in deeply: nothing replaces the lived experience of a real assistive technology user.
Walking the team through our product, my way
My contribution to the day was a live, firsthand walkthrough of Khan Academy’s product, including plotting a point on an accessible graph, reading an article and chatting with the Khanmigo learning assistant, using the tools I rely on every day: a screen reader and a refreshable braille display. No simulation. No blindfold exercise. No hypothetical personas. Just an honest tour of exactly where our product shines and exactly where it falls short, delivered by someone who navigates the web this way as a matter of daily life.
This is the kind of feedback that hits differently for sighted developers and designers. Reading a WCAG checklist tells you what the rules are. Watching a native screen reader user encounter an unlabeled button, a focus trap, or a beautifully structured heading hierarchy tells you why the rules exist. As Elizabeth put it in her article, this is the most powerful kind of feedback there is.
A full day of awareness paired with action
My walkthrough was one piece of a genuinely well-designed day. Engineering Manager and Accessibility Architect Jeanette Head opened by celebrating the past year’s accessibility wins and setting ambitious goals for the year ahead. Senior Engineer Marcy Sutton Todd led a No Mouse Challenge, asking participants to navigate using only Tab, Shift+Tab, the arrow keys, Enter, and Escape — and watching colleagues discover keyboard traps and missing focus indicators in real time was its own kind of education.
The day closed with a Big Bug Bash devoted entirely to accessibility. By the end, more than 20 accessibility bugs had been fixed, with accessibility experts on hand to explain patterns, review fixes, and test solutions before launch.
Why this matters
Longtime readers of Blind Access Journal know I’ve spent more than three decades pushing for digital accessibility, often from the outside in. What made this GAAD meaningful for me was being on the inside — invited not as an afterthought or a compliance checkbox, but as a colleague whose perspective shaped the day.
Awareness paired with action. That’s the standard every organization should hold itself to, on GAAD and on the other 364 days of the year.
Go read Elizabeth’s full recap on the Khan Academy Blog, and if your organization hasn’t yet put a real assistive technology user in front of your product team, consider this your nudge.