Inclusive by Design: TU Dublin Researchers Spotlighted on Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Thursday, May 15th, 2025, marked the 14th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), a global event dedicated to sparking dialogue, reflection, and action around digital access and inclusion. Celebrated around the world, GAAD highlights the urgent need to ensure that digital technologies are inclusive and accessible to the over one billion people living with disabilities and impairments. From June 2025, this is a legal imperative with the European Accessibility Act becoming enforceable in Ireland, mandating that organisations must ensure their digital products are usable by people with disabilities or face legal action.
GAAD 2025 saw significant contributions from TU Dublin researchers, who continue to lead transformative efforts in inclusive technology through the Inclusion4EU project. Funded by the European Union, Inclusion4EU is a collaborative international project led by TU Dublin in collaboration with project partners St. John of God’s Community Services, SAP, Informatics Europe, Telecom Sud Paris, and Mälardalen University. Last week, TU Dublin hosted several workshops in Dublin with all partners wherein teams of stakeholders co-designed accessible assistive technologies for independent living with and for persons with disabilities.
Through a participatory design approach, Inclusion4EU aims to involve marginalised users directly in the development of digital technologies, ensuring that their needs are represented from the outset. This approach challenges traditional top-down development models, which often result in inaccessible or inequitable technology and flawed data systems.
Dr Dympna O’Sullivan, project lead at TU Dublin remarked:
Our premise is that inclusive technology starts with participatory processes and that marginalised users are too often excluded from the design and decision-making stages, leading to inaccessible tools, biased data and flawed AI that reinforce inequality.
Key members of the TU Dublin research team including Emma Murphy, John Gilligan, Damon Gordon, Anna Becevel, Claudia Rivera, Andrea Curley and Svetlana Hensman who have been instrumental in developing openly available tools and resources to support inclusive software design. The team are supported by several postdoctoral researchers and PhD students who are researching digital accessibility including Dr Giulio Gabrieli, Fatima Badmos, Peterson Jean and Tiamelo Makati. These materials are tailored for use by computer science educators and industry professionals and can be freely accessed here.
As the tech industry and academic institutions reflect on GAAD 2025, the message from TU Dublin researchers is clear: inclusive design is not optional; it is a legal, ethical and societal imperative. Ensuring digital accessibility means more than meeting compliance standards; it means transforming how we create technology by involving those historically excluded from the process.
To learn more about the Inclusion4EU project and access free co-design resources, visit:
https://ascnet.ie/inclusion4eu-website/