South Africa has reiterated its commitment to building an inclusive society, where everyone can participate and contribute through the National Strategic Framework on Universal Design and Access, a guiding tool aimed at ensuring accessibility for all.
Minister in the Presidency responsible for Women, Youth and Persons with disabilities, Sindisiwe Chikunga, made the commitment as the country joined the global community in observing Global Accessibility Awareness (GAAD) Day, on Thursday.
GAAD is an annual global observance held on the third Thursday of May, to raise awareness and promote the significance of digital accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities.
Chikunga highlighted that, as digital transformation increases, particularly with the advancement of systems, like artificial intelligence (AI), it is becoming increasingly urgent to advocate for accessible web development, software design, policy-making, and everyday digital communication.
“This day will be used to emphasise and encourage everyone to engage with, think about, and learn about digital accessibility and inclusion for the 1 billion global community with disabilities and the 3.3 million persons with disabilities in South Africa,” Chikunga said.
While acknowledging AI technologies’ significant contribution to accessibility by providing features, including automatic captions, alternative text generation, and voice assistants, the Minister stressed the need for human oversight.
“These tools must be reviewed and validated by humans to prevent errors and ensure their relevance. Accessibility is a fundamental to Human Rights, promoting equal opportunities for persons with disabilities,” the Minister said.
She said the National Strategic Framework on Universal Design and Access is premised on the principle that universal design is not a compromise but a necessity.
The framework serves as a prescriptive guide for the promotion and eventual enforcement of universal design and access standards, using a disability inclusion perspective as its motivating force.
As part of its efforts, the department highlighted common digital accessibility barriers that can be addressed as quick wins, and these include:
• Poor Colour Contrast: Ensure text stands out against the background.
• Missing Text: All meaningful images and links should include descriptive alt text.
• Keyboard Navigation Gaps: All functionalities should be accessible via keyboard.
• Lack of Focus Indicators: Let users know where they are on the page. – SAnews.gov.za
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Grave Scuttlebutt
Vatican City: You have two cows. They were both taken advantage of as calves.
TeederSmartie
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.