Japan Celebrates Digital Accessibility All Year Long Guest article by Makoto Ueki, accessibility consultant, Tokyo

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This is a guest article written by Makoto Ueki. Makoto lives in Japan. He helps people make web content that is easier for disabled people to use. He also organizes events in Japan for the other people who care about access. His article talks about how Japan celebrates Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). He also runs monthly access events in Tokyo. In April Lainey visited Japan and spoke at the monthly meeting. Makoto offers advice in this article about how to start a monthly gathering or celebrate GAAD. His advice: The most important thing is to start!

Screenshot of GAAD Japan website. The page is in Japanese. It also shows the logo of GAAD Japan, the date of the event, main categories of the website and so on

Lainey’s introduction

On April 17, 2025 I joined 60 people in Tokyo for their monthly digital accessibility MeetUp, A11y Tokyo. (A-eleven-Y is short for accessibility because there are 11 letters between the A and the Y.)

Meeting accessibility champions in Tokyo, sharing what’s happening in the United States, and learning more about accessibility in Japan was a highlight of my first trip to the country.

A month later, on May 15, over 1,000 accessibility advocates across Japan celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). It was streamed globally with English captions and I was able to tune in for some of it from the United States.

Both the MeetUp and eight and one half hours of GAAD programming were organized by a group of committed volunteers led by Makoto Ueki. Makoto is a Japanese accessibility consultant, community builder, and friend to so many of us across in the global accessibility community. (Inviting me to speak at the Meetup was just one of many many things he and his wife Junko did to welcome me to Japan and make the trip so special.)

In this guest article, Makoto shares how he has built accessibility awareness and action through both GAAD and the MeetUp. Please read to the end where Makoto assures everyone:

If you want to build accessibility community where you are, you can – but first you have to start.Makoto Ueki

Jump to the following sections of Makoto Ueki’s guest article (listed after my introduction):

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Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025 in Japan

The third Thursday in May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). This year, it was May 15. How did you celebrate GAAD? In Japan, we had our biggest celebration yet.

I hosted a one day webinar called GAAD Japan 2025. This year was the 6th time it was held. Thanks to everyone’s support, the number of participants exceeded 1,000. It was the second time we had that many people.

In line with the purpose of GAAD, “GAAD Japan” has been offering a variety of topics for the digital field, based on the concept of enlightening people about accessibility. Web, apps, video, assistive technology, e-books, games, e-sports, PDF, fonts, CMS, speech recognition technology, etc. Starting in 2022, we also offer a session each year from the Digital Agency, a Japanese ministry that promotes future-oriented DX (Digital Transformation) and aims to rapidly build public and private infrastructure for the digital age.

GAAD Japan 2025 delivered six sessions and five lightning talks from 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM online. Topics covered this year included, but were not limited to:

  • Speech Recognition Technology and Captioning
  • Data on digital accessibility
  • Initiatives at a Web Design/Development Company
  • Color Accessibility 101
  • Communication Design Guide for Everyone
  • Web Accessibility Initiative in a Large Corporation
  • Various digital accessibility-related tools
  • Employment and careers for people with disabilities
  • Hearing impairment and visual design
  • Digital Agency Design System

Due to the positive evaluation of our achievements and webinar content during past GAAD events, in 2025 we received sponsorship from as many as 24 companies. In addition, 15 volunteers helped edit the auto-captions and 3 sign language interpreters provided constant sign language interpretation throughout the day.

Thanks to the support of so many of you, we have been able to continue holding “GAAD Japan” and look forward to the future.

The roots and growth of GAAD Japan

GAAD Japan started in 2020.

That year, we had originally planned to hold an in-person event in Osaka to debrief the CSUN conference. (The CSUN conference is the biggest accessible technology conference in the United States. I have been attending for over 20 years.)

We had to cancel the CSUN debrief because the pandemic began and all of the Japanese speakers who were scheduled to attend CSUN did not attend. We thought, “What can we do instead?” So we decided to organize an online event for the GAAD in Japan.

The number of participants in GAAD Japan has grown significantly over the years. Here are the numbers: 334 participants (2020); 505 participants (2021) 686 participants (2022); 761 participants (2023); 1,037 (2024); 1,037 participants (2025).

Oddly enough, we had 1,037 participants in both 2024 and 2025. In both years the number of participants has exceeded 1,000, which means that the number of participants has tripled since the first event in 2020.

Accessible, inclusive GAAD

One of the things I’ve learned from organizing the GAAD Japan is to make the online event more accessible and inclusive. For example, when we organized the GAAD Japan for the first time in 2020, we got a comment from an attendee who was both deaf and blind.

She was using a braille display because she wasn’t able to see and hear. We were using a speech-to-text app called “UD Talk” to provide the real-time captions. The automated captions worked very well and she was enjoying the events by using her braille display. UDTalk allows braille display users to get braille output from the UDTalk’s captions.

But it was difficult for the app to recognize the speech in the video when one of the speakers played a video. She told us about it.

Since then, we ask speakers to provide caption text beforehand so that we could present captions manually with the UD Talk while playing videos.

Spreading across Japan, despite weak law

Beginning in 2024 we started sub-events with public viewings in various locations throughout Japan. The GAAD Japan gatherings were held in Chiba, Kanazawa, Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima, Kochi, Fukuoka, and Okinawa!

In Japan, there has been no law that mandates accessibility of websites and applications, even for public sectors such as the Japanese governments, local governments and so on. Of course, public organizations are encouraged to do so, and related laws are being developed, but compared to other developed countries, Japan lags far behind. For the private sector, there continues to be even less pressure.

Even under such circumstances, the fact that the number of participants is increasing year after year is a sign that interest in digital accessibility and inclusive design is growing, gradually but surely, even in Japan.

More than GAAD: Monthly Accessibility Tokyo Meetups

To change the subject a bit, I started co-hosting a monthly “A11y Tokyo Meetup” in Tokyo starting in January 2023. This is a very small meetup, but it is a hybrid format, held at a venue in Tokyo and also streamed online.

announcement for A11y Tokyo Meetup with picture of Lainey Feingold and text "The Digital Accessibility Legal Landscape in the U.s.

On-site attendees range from 20 to 30, but have recently exceeded 50; in April 2025, with Lainey as our guest, we had about 60 attendees, which was the full capacity of the venue. Online participants range from 50 to 70, sometimes close to 100 at the most.

I work in web accessibility, but I try to focus on non-web accessibility and inclusive design as much as possible at these meetups. Partly because of my personal interest, but also because I want people to know that accessibility is related to everything around us.

For your information, some of the topics we have covered at the meetups include:

  • Learning Disability
  • Daily Necessities
  • Packaging Design
  • Stationery
  • Cosmetics & Beauty
  • Movies
  • Museums
  • Virtual Reality (VR)
  • Tourism
  • U.S. Laws

Want to create accessibility community where you live? Do it!

Having co-organized and managed both GAAD Japan and the A11y Tokyo Meetup, I can tell you one thing.

“Rome was not built in a day.”

This may be true for everything, but results are not always immediate. If you think and believe that “It’s worth doing, this is what I want to do,” you should make a first step for it. And then, you must steadily continue to do what you think is worth doing.

It doesn’t matter how many people you start with. The number really doesn’t matter. Just kick off!

I myself have made various efforts, but I have not had any kind of special strategies. I have just continued to do.

Looking back, my personal approach to web accessibility may be the same. I became independent consultant about 20 years ago. During the two decades, there have been many peaks and valleys. Still, I have continued to work tirelessly on web accessibility.

Even in Japan, where legislation is still in its infancy, the number of people interested in web accessibility has been growing significantly in recent years, as evidenced by the number of participants in GAAD Japan.

Let me repeat my point. First, start. Once you start, keep going. If you have something in mind that you would like to start, start with it. You will find and get something. Absolutely. Trust me.

About Makoto Ueki

Makoto is a web accessibility consultant for Japanese global companies since 2004 when he started his own company Infoaxia, Inc. His professional services include web/app accessibility assessment, usability testing for accessibility, on and off the job trainings for web designers/developers, in-house guidelines and documentation, and so on. He has been participating in W3C’s Accessibility Guidelines Working Group since 2005. He used to be a chairman of Web Accessibility Infrastructure Committee (WAIC) in Japan and a chair of the committee and the working group for the Japanese national standard for web accessibility (JIS X 8341-3). He is also the first Certified Professional for Web Accessibility (CPWA) by IAAP in Japan.