Join hosts Natalie MacLees and Natalie Garza for the 24th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, where they discuss the various types of disabilities that affect web accessibility. They explore common misconceptions, highlight the specific needs and best practices for users with vision, auditory, cognitive, physical/motor, and seizure-related disabilities, and discuss additional considerations for temporary and situational disabilities.
Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 24. My name is Natalie Garza, and with me today is,
Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees
Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to answer all our questions in digital accessibility. In this episode, we’re gonna talk about all the different types of disabilities that can impact your use of the web, and it’s not just blind people. So, to get started, why does everyone just think digital accessibility affects blind people?
Natalie MacLees: I am not really sure exactly where that comes from, but you will have a lot of developers, I think, in particular for some reason, who think that making a website or web application accessible just means making it work with screen readers. So it’s not even just users who are blind, but actually specifically screen reader users.
Right. So I’m not exactly sure where that, where that idea comes from, but you do hear it a lot. And then you hear a lot of accessibility professionals say it’s not just screen readers.
Natalie Garza: All right, so we’re going to break down the different disability types or groups, starting with the first category of disabilities. Do you wanna talk about that one?
Natalie MacLees: A permanent disability. So a disability that once it is acquired, will have for the rest of your life. There are many, many different types of these disabilities.
Of course, the first up would be some kind of vision impairment. Which could include being completely blind, but could also include being just low vision. So somebody who has some vision, but not, you know, obviously not 2020 vision, which is a lot of, a lot of people. ‘Cause everybody who wears glasses or contact lenses, right? But there’s a spectrum. There’s a spectrum of, maybe you just need to wear glasses to read. Right, would be kind of at one end, and then all the way at the other end would be you have very little vision in your eyes, and maybe can only distinguish general shapes or lightness from darkness. And anywhere in between.
And then we also have other types of disabilities that affect vision, like color blindness. There are many, many different types of colorblindness. The most common one being just red-green colorblindness. So people who cannot distinguish, red colors from green colors. But there are many other types including complete colorblindness where people, just see the world in black and white and cannot perceive color at all.
Sometimes, your vision can disappear from the middle outward, and sometimes from outward in, or sometimes you lose your front vision, but still have peripheral vision, or the other way around. There are all kinds of interesting things that can happen to eyes.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. So, what do we have to keep in mind for people with vision impairment?
Natalie MacLees: Sure. There’s a few different things. For colorblindness, you just wanna make sure that all of your colors have sufficient contrast, that they can be distinguished from one another, that you’re not relying on color alone to communicate information. That you would also wanna have text or icons or something like that, that would communicate that.
For people with low vision, they are going to tend to use a screen magnifier, which is just going to blow up the text on their screen, if it’s 12 pixel or 16 pixel text on a website. They will blow that up until it is the size of, you know, two or 300 pixel typeface to be able to read it and distinguish the letters. Then, they may also use screen readers. Which are just going to read aloud all of the content that’s on the site. So you wanna make sure that everything has accessible names and that everything is labeled correctly. And then also we could have refreshable braille displays in here, but all the same things that make a website work well with a screen reader also help to make it work well with a refreshable braille display.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, so it’s not just blind people, even within the vision impairment group, there’s so much variety.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. And it turns out that, like when we think of people who are blind, we think of complete blindness, right? Like, no vision at all. And it turns out that’s actually pretty rare. But the group of people who are what we would call legally blind. It’s much bigger. And those people do have some vision, and like I, we already discussed, it’s on a spectrum, but that’s much more common to have at least a little bit of vision.
Natalie Garza: Do you wanna move on to the next group of disabilities?
Natalie MacLees: Sure, so we covered eyes and now we’ll go to ears. So, being deaf or hard of hearing for a lot of websites that doesn’t have a lot of impact, but if a website includes multimedia or audio, then obviously that is going to impact anyone who isn’t able to hear those things. Or if you have an app that relies on notification sounds or something like that. Obviously, somebody who cannot hear will not be able to hear those things.
So you wanna make sure that you have captions or transcripts for any audio or video. And whenever possible, if you can provide sign language interpretation as well, that’s always appreciated and very helpful. A lot of people who are deaf learn sign language as their first language, and it has its own vocabulary and grammar, and is very different from spoken language. And so learning to read written language, right? Whatever language, wherever people happen to live, whatever language that is, it’s a very different language.
And so sometimes there can be a little bit of issues with processing written language, just because somebody’s first language was sign language. And so it’s just like anybody else learning a second language, it’s a lot more challenging and harder to process and harder to pick up on nuances and turns of phrase and things like that. So, wherever you can, provide sign language interpretation for that.
Natalie Garza: And even people who are hard of hearing. They have not lost all of their hearing. They can probably struggle with background sounds on videos and stuff like that.
Natalie MacLees: Yes, yes. It can be a real struggle, if you are hard of hearing to hear voices, if you’re out in a loud restaurant, trying to have a conversation with friends, but watching a video on the web can be really difficult if there’s background music playing or background noise of some kind happening on the video.
Natalie Garza: And there are auditory processing disorders, too, where you can hear everything. You just can’t process it.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. You can have, you know, some kind of a physical problem with your ear, but then there can also be a problem with just communication between your ear and your brain, so there can be some kind of issue there as well where maybe sign language or being able to read captions or transcripts or things like that could be extra helpful.
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. Do you wanna move on to the next group of disabilities?
Natalie MacLees: Sure. Next, we have cognitive disabilities, and this is a huge group, including many, many different types of disabilities. That can be traumatic brain injuries, there can be memory challenges, ADHD, learning disabilities, dyslexia, and more and more and more. It’s a huge, huge category that impacts a lot of different people.
And generally, you just wanna make sure that your website is really clear and direct and easy to use and understand, that your layouts are clear. It’s not all cluttery. It’s easy to figure out where to go. It’s easy to figure out where you are, so if you think about like those little breadcrumbs along the top of websites, those are really helpful, right?
For figuring out like, “wait, where am I?” And then to figure out, “oh, I’m in this section on this page”. So just things like that are really helpful for that group. And the nice thing about all of those things is they’re really nice for everybody because we’re all busy and distracted and doing 10 other things when we’re using the web.
So all of those things that you would do to help somebody with cognitive disabilities are really gonna make your website a lot more useful for literally everyone.
Natalie Garza: So not just cognitive disabilities can benefit, everybody can benefit.
Natalie MacLees: Yes, everyone can benefit from those things. And then we’ll move along to our next group, which is the physical or motor disabilities. Now obviously, if somebody is a wheelchair user and has mobility issues with their legs, that’s not gonna really impact their use of the web because we mostly use our eyes, our ears, our hands, and our fingers for accessing the web.
But, for somebody who does have some kind of disability that impacts their fine motor control or impacts their ability to move or use their hands, it will definitely impact their use of the web. And there are a million different assistive technology devices that can help in that situation. Basically, if there is some part of your body, even if it is just your eyes, that you can control the movement of, there is an assistive technology that will help you use the web. So if you can move one thumb, if you can move your eyes, you can use eye tracking. If you can move your cheek. If you remember, Stephen Hawking could move his cheek and had a device that attached here (to his glasses) that he could kind of twitch the muscles there to navigate around on a computer. There are so many different things that can be used.
There are foot pedals, and there are sip and puff devices. All the different ways that you can still use the web. The thing that you wanna make sure of when you’re coding a website is to make sure that it works with a keyboard only, and you might say, “You didn’t even mention keyboards just now”, but all of those devices, all of those assistive technology devices that help somebody as far as the computer is concerned, those are all keyboards.
And so as long as a keyboard can navigate around a site, then all of these other types of devices will be able to get around the site as well. So put your mouse away. Make sure you can use everything on your website with just the keyboard.
Natalie Garza: They’re all basically receiving the same signals, right? Like next, select.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. So just like hitting a tab key or a shift tab key, or the space bar, or the enter key. Yes, it all works the exact same way as just using a keyboard, so that’s the best thing that you can do to make sure that you’re accommodating people with motor and fine motor control.
Natalie Garza: Yes. And then the last disability group is the seizure disorders.
Natalie MacLees: Yes. So people might have, you know, epilepsy, or they might have different types of vestibular disorders, migraines, or different conditions that get triggered by a lot of light or motion or flashing. And so you wanna be very mindful that you don’t have an animation running right next to the login box where people are trying to type in their username and password, and there’s this motion happening that can’t be stopped or disabled. You wanna be really mindful of that.
And then anytime that you have animation or motion, it should hopefully respect the prefers reduced motion setting in the browser and not have that motion if somebody has that turned on. It should be able to be paused, ’cause not all users know about that setting, but might prefer that everything can be paused. And you would wanna make sure that you don’t have any flashing kinds of animations that could trigger somebody to have a seizure or to become dizzy or faint or anything like that. You could really cause some physical harm to somebody by not being thoughtful about how you implement those kinds of things.
Natalie Garza: I feel like with the rest of the disabilities, it’s more about inclusion and just like making sure they can access information. But seizure disorders could be dangerous for some people.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, it could be really dangerous. Yeah. Or you can make somebody sick to their stomach. That’s another thing that can happen.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, not pretty.
Natalie MacLees: Not, not pretty, not nice. Not a good experience.
Natalie Garza: All right. So those are the permanent disabilities, right?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah.
Natalie Garza: We have two other categories that we can review. Would you like to start with the next one?
Natalie MacLees: So, in addition to those kinds of permanent disabilities, it’s also important to remember that we have temporary disabilities, which are just illness or injury, and we also have situational disability, which is just the situation that you happen to be in at the time.
That can also impact your use of the web. So if you break your arm or if you’re outside on a bright, sunny day, different things like that are temporary or situational. That can also be helped by making sure that your website is accessible. And just making sure that you’re able to access information as expected, even when you have a broken arm or you’re in a noisy room,]
Natalie Garza: Yeah, all in all, we have the permanent disabilities that we covered in depth. We have the temporary disabilities and we have the situational disabilities. It’s not just blind people, you guys, digital accessibility helps everybody. And if you want to make your website accessible, what can you do?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, come on over to AAArdvarkAccessibility.com. You can scan your homepage for free and find out all of the issues and how to fix them.
Natalie Garza: All right. So with that, thank you guys for joining us. That was episode 24 of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. We will talk to y’all next time.
