Title: How People With Disabilities Use the Web
Course: Web Accessibility MOOC for Educators > Section: Creating Accessible HTML Pages

How do people who cannot move their arms use your website? What about people who cannot see well or at all? Or people who have difficulty hearing or understanding, or have other accessibility needs?

Diversity of Web Users - How People with Disabilities Use the Web

There are many reasons why people may be experiencing varying degrees of auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. For instance, some may have disabilities from birth, an illness, disease, or accident, or they may develop impairments with age. Some may not consider themselves to have disabilities even if they do experience such functional limitations. This module introduces how people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments, use the Web. It describes tools and approaches that people with different kinds of disabilities use to browse the Web and the design barriers they encounter on the Web. It helps developers, designers, and others to understand the principles for creating accessible websites, web applications, browsers, and other web tools.

How People with Disabilities Use the Web: Overview. Shadi Abou-Zahra, ed. Copyright © 2012 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio). Status: Draft Updated 1 August 2012.Retrieved June 3, 2015 from W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Overview  (For more information, see Using WAI Material.)

People use a variety of technologies to access the web. For example, a person who is blind may use a speech output system that reads aloud text presented on the screen. A person with a mobility impairment may be unable to use a mouse and may rely on the keyboard for web browsing. To create resources that can be used by the widest spectrum of potential visitors rather than an idealized "average," web page designers should apply universal design principles. This requires that they consider the needs of individuals with a wide range of disabilities, ages, and native languages.

Here are stories of how people with disabilites use the Web

- Mr. Lee frequently shops online and he has one of the most common visual disabilities for men: color blindness which in his case means an inability to distinguish between green and red.. (It is not suprising that many of our students who work in the welding field also have the visual disablility of color blindness.) Mr. Lee has difficulty reading the text on many websites. When he first started using the Web, it seemed to him the text and images on a lot of websites used poor color contrast, since they appeared to use similar shades of brown. He realized that many websites were using colors that were indistinguishable to him because of his red/green color blindness. In some cases, the site instructions explained that discounted prices were indicated by red text, but all of the text looked brown to him. In other cases, the required fields on forms were indicated by red text, but again he could not tell which fields had red text.

- Ms. Martinez is taking several distance learning courses in physics. She is 42 years old, and has been hard of hearing since birth. She can hear some sounds but not enough to understand all speech, so she learned sign language in addition to written language. She had little trouble with the curriculum until the university upgraded their online material to a multimedia approach, using an extensive collection of audio lectures. For classroom-based lectures the university provided sign language interpreters and CART writers (professionals typing what is being said verbatim). However, for web-based instruction, they initially did not realize that accessibility was an issue, then said they had no idea how to provide the material in accessible format.

- Ms. Laitinen is the chief accountant at an insurance company that uses web-based documents and forms over a corporate intranet. She is blind and, like many other blind computer users, does not read braille.To use her computer and the Web, Ms. Laitinen uses:
  - Screen reader software that interprets what is displayed on the screen and generates speech output
  - Web browser with keyboard support to help use websites without a mouse
    - She uses the keyboard to navigate websites, often by jumping from heading to heading to get an overview of what is on a web page. Her screen reader indicates the structural information on a web page such as headings, column and row headings in tables, list items, links, form controls, and more. She has become accustomed to listening to speech output at a speed that her co-workers cannot understand at all. However, when websites are not coded properly and do not include structural information, Ms. Laitinen would have to read every web page from top to bottom to find the information that she needs. This is unmanageable and she avoids such websites where she can, both for leisure and for business.

How People with Disabilities Use the Web: Stories of Web Users. Shadi Abou-Zahra, ed. Copyright © 2012 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio). Status: Draft Updated 1 August 2012.Retrieved June 3, 2015 from W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Stories of Web Users  (For more information, see Using WAI Material.)Stories of Web Users - How People with Disabilities Use the Web