Types of Disabilities
There are four broad categories of disabilities that have an impact on how a person interacts with a web site: vision impairment, mobility impairment , auditory impairment, and cognitive impairments.
- Vision impairment
People that are blind or have low vision use a variety of assistive technology to get content from the screen, including screen readers, Braille displays, screen magnifiers, and even some combination of these.
- Mobility impairment
Mobility challenges range from having no use of the hands at all to difficulties with fine motor control. Various hardware solutions include modified mice and keyboards, single-button “switches,” foot pedals, head wands, and joysticks, while software solutions range from full voice recognition to face tracking to simple keyboard macros.
- Auditory impairment
Auditory impairments may seem to have little to no impact on how people use the Web, as most content is text and images. A person who has never been able to hear, however, may process language completely differently than a hearing person or someone with hearing loss that occurred later. There are requirements for captioning for multimedia and audio files to make this type of media accessible to everyone.
- Cognitive impairment
Cognitive impairments, which involve memory, reading comprehension, mathematical processing, visual comprehension, problem solving, and attention, are the least understood of the various accessibility issues. Although there isn’t a large body of ...
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