What is GAAD?
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on May 15, 2025, marks its 14th year of promoting digital inclusion and accessibility for people with disabilities. The GAAD Foundation, founded in 2021, continues to push for accessibility to be built into technology from the start, not as an afterthought. Recent WebAIM statistics highlight that over 98% of websites still have accessibility issues, with common problems like low contrast text and missing alt text. GAAD encourages individuals and organizations to raise awareness, take action, and build a more inclusive digital world.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is a day of a11y celebration designed to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities.
May 15th, 2025 marks the 14th annual GAAD.
The GAAD Foundation was established in 2021 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of GAAD. The foundation aims to transform how technology and digital products are developed by making accessibility an essential and fundamental requirement rather than an afterthought.
2025 Statistics and the WebAIM 1,000,000
The WebAIM million is an annual study by WebAIM that evaluates accessibility across one million websites. It identifies common barriers for people with disabilities and serves as a benchmark for measuring digital inclusion progress and highlighting areas needing improvement.
Here are relevant statistics to display the importance of not only this day but of course digital accessibility in general:
- About 1 billion people (out of 8.2 billion), or 12.2%, have a disability worldwide
- Across the 1,000,000 home pages scanned, 50,960,288 distinct accessibility errors were detected- an average of 51 errors per page
- Websites that use common cookie compliance technologies, such as OneTrust, averaged notably fewer errors on their sites
- Websites that use browser fingerprinting and user tracking technologies, such as FingerprintJS and ClientJS had significantly more errors on average
- 14% of web pages that had ReCAPTCHA had 12.1 errors or more than the average
- 13.9% of pages were detected having Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), and had 7.6 more errors than the average
- Data suggests that digital advertisements consistently ranked as the most significant contributors to accessibility violations
- Home/Landing pages that used the popular CSS framework Bootstrap had 12.2 more accessibility errors on average than those that did not
- Of the 1,000,000 website homepages scanned, over 1,200 different types of web technologies were detected
- 16.6% of tables on websites have valid data markup
Content Management System statistics:
- Divi was on 8,672 home pages, had 27.6 errors on average, which was 45.9% less than average
- Webflow was on 10,277 home pages, had 28.4 errors on average, which was 44.3% less than average
- Adobe Experience Manager was on 5,425 home pages, had 30.7 errors on average, which was 39.8% less than average
- TYPO3 CMS was on 5,730 home pages, had 41.5 errors on average, which was 18.5% less than average
- Drupal was on 19,257 home pages, had 41.9 errors on average, which was 17.7% less than average
- Joomla was on 6,426 home pages, had 47.1 errors on average, which was 7.5% less than average
- Wordpress was on 241,401 home pages, had 50 errors on average, which was 1.9% less than average
- Elementor was on 51,205 home pages, had 51.1 errors on average, which was 45.9% more than average
- wpBakery was on 17,576 home pages, had 63.5 errors on average, which was 45.9% more than average
- 1C-Bitrix was on 11,706 home pages, had 97 errors on average, which was 45.9% more than average
Ways to Help
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Attend online or in-person accessibility events
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Position yourself as a champion looking to make a positive change in your area of work
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Host an event to talk about accessibility to a community who needs to learn about it, which is essentially every community
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Turn awareness into action: participate in projects, initiatives, or activies