People with different disabilities face various challenges when using the web. Therefore, it is important to offer solutions in web development so that people don't have to miss out on the content you create.
Table Of Contents
Challenges and solutions for people with
- Visual disabilities and deafblindness
- Auditory disabilities
- Motor disabilities
- Cognitive disabilities
- Dyslexia and reading disabilities
- Speech Disabilities
- Conclusion
1. Visual disabilities and deafblindness
Visual impairment includes disabilities such as blindness, low vision, or color blindness. Deaf-blindness means that a person is both deaf and blind.
Blindness does not necessarily mean that a person has completely lost vision, but can also refer to partial blindness where vision may be extremely limited.
Low vision is a broad category with many different conditions and varying degrees of visual impairment. Most people with low vision cannot see well enough to drive a car or read most printed text unless they magnify it. They often see content, faces, and objects blurred, with low contrast or dark spots or shadows.
People who suffer from color blindness cannot distinguish between certain colors (usually of equal brightness or luminosity) such as green and red tones.
Challenges and solutions
People have difficulty distinguishing between colors, seeing small or low-contrast text, or recognizing text at all.
Screen readers can read user interfaces and content aloud by converting digital text to speech, but only if they are designed to be accessible. Therefore, web designers and developers need to create markup that is compatible with assistive technologies (semantic HTML, ARIA).
Screen magnifiers enlarge the content on the screen to make it more readable. This works perfectly when the design is fully responsive.
Software and hardware give users the option to increase color contrast themselves, or designers already create content with high enough contrast to make it easier to read and interact with.
Don't rely on color alone to provide information! Especially with labeling, it is important to choose not only color, but also other means such as text or different borders to help users distinguish content.
For a deafblind person, the only option is to use an refreshable Braille display in combination with a screen reader to perceive text and audio (via a text transcript).
2. Auditory disabilities
People with hearing impairments, hearing loss or deafness do not have as many problems as people with visual impairments, since most of the web is accessible through visual or textual representation. There are major difficulties with multimedia content such as audio or video.
Challenges and solutions
People cannot hear audio content or the audio portion of videos.
Providing synchronized captions with videos, a transcript of the audio, or sign language interpretation allows people to understand your content.
3. Motor disabilities
Motor disabilities range from tremors of the hands to partial or complete paralysis of the entire body.
Challenges and solutions
The web is often designed for mouse users, which makes it difficult for users who struggle with hand tremors, can't move their hands, or have no hands at all.
Therefore, it is critical to make web content available not only for mouse users, but also for keyboard users and other assistive technologies. Assistive technologies can be alternative keyboards, mouth pens, eye-tracking technologies, and more. Developers need to ensure that web content is accessible to keyboard devices by using the right semantic HTML and ARIA.
In addition, you should give users more time to interact with your web content by allowing them to adjust, extend, or turn off the time limit, as they may take longer due to slower movements.
4. Cognitive disabilities
Cognitive disabilities are by far the most common form of disability.
Challenges and solutions
People can find it difficult or overwhelming to understand complex designs and tasks, solve technical problems, or troubleshoot errors.
Therefore, it's important to create simple user interfaces that are predictable, well-organized, and simplified. When handling errors, such as in forms, be sure to provide clear solutions and constructs for fixing errors.
5. Dyslexia and reading disabilities
Many people with cognitive disabilities also have difficulty reading. Some read at a lower level than other people of the same age, and others cannot read at all. People with dyslexia often have difficulty spelling or reading words.
Challenges and solutions
People with reading disabilities often perceive words differently, as if similar words float, do not line up, or see letters like p b d q as the same letter. As a result, it often takes them more time to read and process content, and they may have a hard time spelling words correctly or completing tasks like CATPCHA (security feature).
For us designers and developers, it is crucial to allow extra time to complete tasks by providing the option to extend the time period or change the type of task set.
Many users rely on the ability to use a special font that weights the letters and makes similar characters appear differently, change the font, change the contrast or add underlining to keep words in line, or even apply a custom style sheet to perceive the content. Make sure you provide these options when writing the code.
Some people also use screen readers to get content in an auditory way to reinforce what they are seeing, or to highlight the word or phrase being read to make it easier to follow.
6. Speech Disabilities
Speech disabilities are characterized by the inability to produce or organize speech sounds and syllables correctly or fluently. Some types of speech disabilities include inarticulateness, stuttering, or mutism, which is the complete loss of voice.
Challenges and solutions
People with speech disabilities may not be able to use speech-based tools like Zoom or Google Meets. Therefore, you should offer alternatives such as chat or email to communicate.
Some people may also have another disability, such as a hearing or motor disability. Make sure your code is accessible to make it usable by assistive technologies such as screen readers and present information in different forms, such as transcripts.
7. Conclusion
When creating web content, make sure from the beginning that the content can be perceived by all people, regardless of what kind of disability they may have.
Making content fully accessible to screen readers already seems to solve most of the problems a user might face. This could therefore be a good starting point for web content creation to at least focus on.
Thanks for your reading and time. I really appreciate it!
Top comments (6)
Thank you again for this post, just a little precision concerning screen readers, which are more than simple text to speech applications like some browser plugins.
They are doing more than that, by rendering the names, values, and roles of the elements (w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#name-role-value) for example.
Hi Franco! Thank you so much for pointing this out. I still need to learn to explain things in more detail and not always assume people know. You are absolutely right! Screen readers have so much power when provided with the right information, which we as developers are responsible for.
This article was meant more as an overview of the topic without going into detail at certain points. I hope in the future I have written enough articles with more depth to link them together to avoid confusion or overlooking important information like this.
Thank you so much for your support, I really appreciate it!
Yes, an article about Screen Readers, their history, their purpose, what they provide to disabled people and how, would be very interessing.
Same for Keyboard Navigation.
Such a great topic. Put it on my list!
Another great post.
Thanks Andrew! I really appreciate your support.