The easy guide to Web Accessibility: Day 2 – Challenges people face when accessing a website
Many designers and developers are unaware of the difficulties users can face in accessing digital services and the obstacles that poor design can create. Explaining the different obstacles and the benefits of accessibility to the members of your team can make them empathise with the users and begin to design and develop with accessibility in mind.
Examples include people with the following impairments:
Visual: Blindness, colour blindness and tunnel vision
Hearing: Deafness or partial hearing
Mobility: Difficulty in motor control of all or part of the body
Cognitive: This includes a wide range of conditions including memory impairments and attention disorders
Learning: Dyslexia, attention disorders, retention problems
The 3 broad categories of visual impairments when accessing the web:
Colour blindness: Red and green impairment is most common – so it is important to check use of these colour combinations and avoid conveying information only by colour – a common issue in graphs and charts.
Moderate vision impairment: Ensure pages are useable with magnification software. For example it is helpful not to use images of text as at higher magnification they can become fuzzy and hard to read.
Blind or severe vision impairment: Blind users require a screen reader to access websites. Labelling images with descriptive text and ensuring pages are coded logically will allow the user to easily navigate around, and understand, your page (e.g. the headings are in the correct order starting from H1 all the way to H6).
Users with hearing impairment have challenges with inaccessible multimedia, including video and audio particularly if they lack captions or transcripts.
For people who use British Sign Language or BSL, English is often their second language. Also, certain words in English do not exist in BSL. So it is important to use plain English and ensure that technical and less common words are explained or information is provided in a glossary.
People with mobility impairments face challenges when navigating and interacting with web pages.
Voice recognition software may help navigate sites and interact with web pages.
May need specially designed keyboards and mice to use their computer.
Some of the main categories of functional cognitive disabilities include deficits or difficulties with:
Memory: It may be very difficult for the user to remember multiple errors, or perhaps may even forget the error information before they are even able to address that error.
Problem-solving: One example of this would be the presence of a 404 error from a bad link, or a link that does not take them where they thought they were going.
Attention: Avoiding anything that draws a person's attention away from the main content and using good design, such as color, white space, and simple presentation can help users focus on important content and functionality.
Reading, linguistic, and verbal comprehension: Try to stay away from using company jargon or leaving developers to write error form feedback. Remember that an estimated 15-20% of the population, including many of the brightest minds of recent generations such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, has some sort of language or text comprehension difficulty.
Math comprehension: Broken down explanations help readers understand the reasoning behind the math on a site. Also be cautious of using math equations in Captcha.
Visual comprehension: Some individuals have difficulties processing visual information. In many ways, this is the opposite of the problem experienced by people with reading and verbal processing difficulties. Individuals with visual comprehension difficulties may not recognize objects for what they are. They may recognize the fact that there are objects on a web page, but may not be able to identify the objects.
Other problems people face when accessing a website:
There are a number of other issues away from impairments which can cause accessibility issues when viewing and using a website.
Distractions – E.g. in a busy or noisy environment
Viewing an un-responsive website on a mobile
BCS Accessibility web essentials online course
AEGIS: 15 personas which use people with various impairments
WebAim, Web accessibility in mind
Foundation for people with learning disabilities
Assitive technology - how it benefits the user and the struggles that can occur when viewing a website.
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