Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

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 ...