The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over 15% of the world's population—or 1.3 billion people—self-identify as having a disability, making this group the largest minority group globally.
Types of disabilities
- Visual disabilities: color blindness, blurry vision, low vision, tubular vision, blind people.
For visual impairments, we may use the magnifier tool, the browser zoom (like zoom at 300%), font sizes, text spacing, line-height and other customizations in the browser. The Windows High Contrast Mode is used for 4% of the Windows devices. Some users will use assistive technologies like audio transcripts or screen readers (Jaws, NVDA or Voice Over) that read aloud the page content (by parsing the HTML code).
Hearing disabilities: deafness or ringing; people will use subtitles or captions for videos and all medias with sound.
Motor skills disabilities: multiple sclerosis, tetraplegia, cerebral palsy, tremors, tendonitis, etc... This type needs to use keyboard navigation or another specific tools, so be careful about the focus visibility or providing a logical order in your pages.
Cognitive disabilities: autism, dyslexia, attention disorders, elderly people, etc... You should take care of providing simple and clear design and layouts, avoid some editorial rules like justified texts or too complexe sentences, use descriptive links and buttons (avoid the "click here" text).
Temporary disabilities
Digital accessibility also benefits for temporary disabilities such as a broken arm, lost glasses or someone recovering from surgery.
Some situational limitations also: bright sunlight or a noisy environment where reading audio transcripts could be usefull for everyone.
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