Disabilities and Digital Accessibility: It’s Not Just Blind People!

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, tha...