Here it comes again: Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), celebrated on the third Thursday of each May. GAAD was created by Joe Devon and Jennison Asuncion, two tech pioneers insistent on digital accessibility as the standard structural principle and prerequisite undergirding every website, app, virtual reality product, video game, etc. Its start a dozen years ago was in response to the ubiquity of inaccessibility online.  Estimates of the proportion of web pages with inaccessible content are as high as 96% globally. 

These numbers show us the status quo a quarter-century after the first publication of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which, for context in internet time, arrived one year after the public launch of Google in September 1998.  

This glacial pace of progress in the basic incorporation of accessible precepts and processes into any digital product design reflects that society remains at best uncertain and at worst terrified of disability.