Building GitHub’s next chapter in accessibility

Five years ago, we stood up GitHub’s accessibility program. What began as a small team addressing accessibility debt has grown into a company-wide discipline, woven into our engineering fundamentals, our design system, our AI tools, and our culture. The five-year milestone prompted us to step back and ask a fundamental question: where do we go from here? The answer is our strategy for accessibility , which we published earlier this year. The strategy marks a pivotal moment for our program. For the first five years, our focus was primarily internal. Going forward, we are turning outward—engaging the global community of developers as we continue to mature internally. We want to build a culture of accessibility across GitHub and include every developer, every team, and every open source project. The strategy is organized around four priorities. On this Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we’re sharing initial progress on each strategic priority. Help improve the accessibility of open source at scale Open source software powers much of the world’s technology, yet many projects are not designed to be usable by people with disabilities. On the eve of GAAD 2025, we took a pledge to help change that . We committed to three goals: empower people with disabilities to contribute to open source, increase the availability of open source assistive technologies, and improve the accessibility of mainstream open source projects. Last year, we launched an open source initiative that is turning our pledge into action. Open Source Assistive Technology Hackathon This week, we’re hosting the first Open Source Assistive Technology Hackathon at GitHub headquarters in San Francisco. Over two days, participants will contribute to 16 featured projects that empower people with disabilities. They include projects that enable blind students to interact with graphical information on the Monarch refreshable tactile display, a project that leverages AI to convert PDF files into an accessible format