Disabilities and the Web

What Is a Disability?

A disability is any condition of the body or mind that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities and interact with the world around them.

Accessibility depends on the user's ability, so to fully understand web accessibility, we need to first understand disabilities.

Assistive Technologies

What Kinds of Disabilities Are Impacted by Inaccessible Websites?

Some disabilities that accessibility guidelines strive to address include the following.

  • Visual: Visual impairments including blindness, various common types of low vision and poor eyesight, various types of color blindness.
     
  • Auditory: Deafness or hearing impairments, including individuals who are hard of hearing.
     
  • Motor/mobility: Disabilities related to motor skills and mobility cover a broad range. Some examples include difficulty or inability to use the hands (tremors, muscle slowness, and/or loss of fine muscle control due to conditions such as Parkinson's disease, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, stroke), limitations of muscle control, paralysis, limitation of sensation, joint disorders, chronic pain, missing, broken, or amputated limbs, and arthritis. People with these types of disabilities may require a special keyboard or mouse, head pointer or mouth stick, foot, shoulder, sip-and-puff switches, voice recognition and eye tracking devices, mouse-like or keyboard-like devices, or other assistive technologies. They typically require more time to interact with the website and may have trouble clicking on small areas.
     
  • Seizures: Photo epileptic seizures caused by visual strobe or flashing effects.
     
  • Cognitive and intellectual: Cognitive and intellectual disabilities can include developmental disabilities, learning difficulties (e.g., dyslexia, dyscalculia), and cognitive disabilities (e.g., PTSD, Alzheimer's) of various origins, as well as conditions affecting memory, attention, developmental maturity, and problem-solving or logic skills.

Accessible Website Essentials

Vision Disabilities (blindness, low vision, color blindness)

  • Web Must Haves – enlarged text, color contrast, audio descriptions for video, text to speech, allow for keyboard navigation, etc. People with these types of disabilities may require the use of a screen reader.

Hearing Disabilities (deaf, hard-of-hearing)

  • Web Must Haves – visual descriptions, transcripts, captions

Physical Disabilities (lack of motor control, speech troubles, many others)

  • Web Must Haves – larger clickable areas, provide more time, provide error correction options, provide clear focus indication, provide skip navigation links.

Cognitive Disabilities (learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus, other psychiatric disabilities)

  • Web Must Haves – structure/semantics are important, consistent labelling, predictable functionality, may use text-to-speech.