Business
Diamond Launches the GAAD Pledge, Announces Facebook as First Company to Take the Pledge (MESA)
Story Highlights
Diamond launched the GAAD Pledge, a commitment made by organizations and developers to make accessibility a core value of their open source projects. In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Facebook will be the first company to take the pledge, committing to making the React Native framework fully accessible.
“When I co-founded Global Accessibility Awareness Day, it was surreal to see the GAAD hashtag go viral each year. However, it is painful to see how much work there is left to do to make digital products accessible to People with Disabilities,” said Joe Devon, COO of Diamond and Co-Founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
“Diamond’s GAAD Pledge enables us to partner with companies like Facebook to help achieve our commitment to make accessibility a core value in every open source project.”
Facebook 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,” said Mike Shebanek, Head of Accessibility at Facebook.
The GAAD Pledge is open to all organizations and can be taken throughout the year as a long-term commitment to accessibility.
You can learn more about the GAAD Pledge here.
In addition to the GAAD Pledge, Diamond will release their second annual State of Accessibility Report (SOAR) on GAAD. The SOAR report identifies specific accessibility deficiencies of top websites and includes a list of actionable steps developers can take to address accessibility issues now.
Key findings include: 39% of the Alexa Top 100 sites lock out blind users from being able to register and login properly. 98.1% of the Top Million Websites are inaccessible with an average of 60.9 errors per page on.
