Each year, on the third Thursday of May, CVS Health® joins organizations around the world to celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The goal of this event is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility, inclusion and the more than one billion people worldwide with disabilities.
At CVS Health, we believe that accessibility enables inclusion. We work to provide our consumers, members, patients and colleagues with disabilities meaningful access to the health and wellness services we offer. We value the insights of our team members from the disability community who help embed empathy and understanding into everything we do.
Inclusion is a north star that guides our work — to see everyone, to welcome everyone, to design for everyone. We’ve built strong collaborations with disability communities and organizations across the country. These collaborations help ensure that we are continuously striving to create inclusive experiences that serve the needs of the greatest possible number of consumers and colleagues.
We are committed to:
Educating colleagues and partners on accessibility standards and best practices
Enabling the design, production and delivery of accessible products and services
Empowering people with disabilities and their allies
We do this through caring and collaboration. We do this together. We do this because everyone’s path to healthier should be barrier-free.
Spoken Rx® talking prescription label
We’re proud of our digital innovations, such as Spoken Rx. Developed in collaboration with the American Council of the Blind, Spoken Rx is a breakthrough feature that reads certain prescription information aloud in English or Spanish via radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. This is an important feature for patients with complete blindness, significant visual impairment, literacy or language difficulties, or dyslexia. It is the first in-app prescription reader to be developed by a national retail pharmacy and is available at no extra cost to patients. To register for Spoken Rx, call your pharmacist, visit a CVS Pharmacy® location or register at CVS.com.
Open-source accessibility tools & resources
Over the past year, we’ve also made it a priority to find new ways to contribute to the accessibility community. The Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design teams released the following free accessibility open-source software projects aimed to help educate, enable and empower accessibility professionals across the industry:
Community engagement
CVS Health is a proud sponsor of the GAAD Foundation and supports their impactful work evangelizing digital accessibility and disability inclusion across the globe.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day was founded by Los Angeles-based web developer Joe Devon, and Jennison Asuncion, who is now head of accessibility engineering evangelism at LinkedIn and a member of the CVS Health National Health Equity Advisory Board.
