By Nanette van Mourik, Sustainability Manager at Sanoma Learning, with collaboration of Katarzyna Werner-Mozolewska, digital accessibility expert at Sanoma Learning
At the heart of our role as one of Europe’s leading K–12 learning companies, lies a strong commitment to creating positive impact through education. As part of Sanoma’s broader sustainability strategy, we focus on enabling inclusive learning and equal opportunities for all students.
In this context, Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) offers an important moment to reflect on the role of accessibility in education and to raise awareness of the importance of inclusive design in digital, print and blended learning materials.
A Sanoma-wide commitment to inclusive learning
Sanoma's commitment to accessibility translates into recognising the diversity of students’ needs and ensuring that our learning solutions are designed to support every pupil, including those with disabilities or different learning profiles. Accessibility is therefore not a separate initiative, but more and more an integral part of how we develop our products and services.
Our ambition is to make the creation of accessible learning materials a natural and standard part of everyday work processes, supported by our Accessibility Guidelines. This approach is grounded in internationally recognised standards such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), and in the understanding that technological developments and educational practice go hand in hand.
To help embed accessibility in daily practice, we have developed a practical checklist for the editorial teams. By integrating accessibility from the very start of method development, the checklist helps shape decisions in content, design and visual materials so that much more students can fully engage with our products.
According to Nanette van Mourik, Sustainability Manager at Sanoma Learning, the accessibility checklist goes beyond the digital domain, supporting editorial teams in everyday decisions.
“It guides teams in choosing colours that work for learners with colour vision deficiencies, structuring content clearly, and designing in ways that better support learners with dyslexia. The checklist can also be shared with external content suppliers, such as providers of images and texts, helping to encourage a consistent approach to accessibility throughout the entire content creation chain”.
That commitment is strengthened by close collaboration across the organisation. Accessibility Expert, Katarzyna Werner‑Mozolewska, shares internal initiatives that highlight the importance of making accessibility practical for creators and teams:
“In 2025, we organised the workshop Designing for Neurodiverse Users, focused on how neurodiversity shapes the way people learn and interact and what that means for our design decisions in learning products. (...) This year, AccessON Code for Everyone engaged 250+ engineers to strengthen practical accessibility skills and embed inclusive thinking across engineering workflows.”
Join us in celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
To help make accessibility more practical and visible in our everyday work, we are encouraging everyone to take part in the GAAD “No-Mouse Challenge” by completing at least one task during the day using only a keyboard, in any tool they use regularly. Check out our quick guide below.
Keyboard essentials:
• Tab / Shift+Tab: move forward/back through links, buttons, form fields
• Enter: activate the focused link/button
• Space: toggle checkboxes
• Arrow keys: scroll; move within menus/radios/list boxes
• Esc: close dialogs, menus, and pop-ups
This hands-on experience helps to highlight accessibility barriers and builds awareness in a simple but impactful way, reinforcing that accessibility is not just a concept, but something we can experience, understand, and improve together in our daily work.
We invite you to take part in the challenge and share your learnings from this experience with us.