It’s easy to imagine that there aren’t very many people in the world with disabilities that impact their ability to access content on the web. It may be something that we don’t have much experience with personally, and that is enough to make it seem like a small, remote problem.

Taken as a whole, though, our efforts to make our pages serve a large population of people, with a wide variety of differences in ability.

Visual Impairments

Users with visual impairments may be completely blind, have low vision, or even may be simply colorblind.  In all of those cases, we need to take into account the way web pages we have created are problems for users with those disabilities.

Screen Readers

In many cases users with visual impairments use screen reader technology to access our web pages. Having a web page read to a person is a very different experience from seeing the content on the page — it turns the experience into a very linear one.  Content doesn’t have spacial relationships with other content, it’s simply in a sequence.  And if we make poor choices in creating our content, the screen reader may be forced to read large chunks of useless code to the listener, rather than providing useful, succinct content.

Hearing Impairments

Basic text-based content is rarely a challenge for users with hearing impairments, but as more and more video and audio is used on the web, we must take into account the needs of users who can’t hear the content. Captions, transcripts, and other solutions are a critical part of meeting the needs of these users.

Motor Impairments

One of the major areas of focus for the WCAG is the way the code web developers create can make it difficult for users who, for example, cannot use a mouse, to interact with a web page.  A user who lacks the fine control and dexterity necessary to use a mouse or trackpad needs to be able to use the keyboard to navigate around in your content.

If you’re a user in this course, odds are you’re not creating the sort of interactive forms and things that might break or interfere with the way a user can navigate a web page with a keyboard. However, when we create long, complex pages we should be cognizant of the needs of people for whom even a few simple keystrokes or clicks can be challenging — forcing users to scroll through long pages of content is not ideal, when we could give them the ability to skip ahead to the content they need with one simple click.

Cognitive Impairments

Users with cognitive impairments have disabilities that impact their ability to comprehend content on the page. In some cases, as with extreme dyslexia, some of the ways we support visually impaired users may help them as well.  Often, though, using language and organization that is simple, transparent, and predictable is very effective in making sure users with a variety of cognitive disabilities can take advantage of our content.