This course has been updated! We now recommend you take the Website Accessibility, v2 course.
Transcript from the "Types of Disability" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Jon: Kinda getting started, like we said, with the different types of disabilities. And again, I think that this mostly helps when, so you think about it accessibility and your sites that you own, or your apps that you own. And then it's a little bit hard to visualize without, but I think coming from this angle of the types of disabilities and the types of assistive technologies.
[00:00:17] Really helps understand how people are coming to your site, how they're using it, and makes it easier to remember the things that you should be looking out for, right? I think, yeah. So people have Attention-Deficit or Hyperactivity Disorders. And there's a lot of good research and work that's been done here about things like keeping your font size big enough, a good amount of spacing between topics.
[00:00:42] Line length as far as characters go. These things which, again, and I'm hoping a constant thread that we kinda can see here is that, things that are good for users with disabilities, more often than not, are good for all users. And I think that's another big win of this, that as you go through and you make your site accessible for people with disabilities, you end up getting a lot of positive feedback from everyone, which is like, it's really easy to understand.
[00:01:06] Click around, use a keyboard, all these different things. Blindness or low vision. So again, when we talk about blindness, we'll talk about screen readers. When we talk about low vision, we'll talk about some different things like color contrast. I have a real privilege of sharing a stage with two different people that work at Google, one with extremely low vision, one blind.
[00:01:31] Doing inaccessibility conference two years ago, and the lady with low vision, she was talking about how a big pet peeve of hers is when she goes to a website and the kinda contrast mode is just black and white. And she's like I'm an artist, I love color, I love great visual designs and experiences, it just needs to meet these minimum, I just need to not be.
[00:01:55] Unseeable for me, but other than that like, really getting bummed out like when she clicks the button and the site just become it's this boring at mess. People with brain injuries, deaf or hard of hearing, this one plays big if you have a video site from the masters offering and close captioning, it's just such a great thing.
[00:02:12] People with learning disabilities. Again this plays in to specific types of sites you might have. But just doing a little bit of research, and a little bit of understanding on people with learning or attention disabilities. And how to make it easier for them to take in information. People with physical disabilities this can be a lot of different things whether they don't or can't use a mouse.
[00:02:34] Are they keyboard only users whether they're using a specialty device like a single switch, which we'll cover in the next topic. And also things like if you're doing mobile app experiences, making sure there's enough space in between your click targets and things like that for people that don't have as much precision to still be able to use your app.
[00:02:54] And then people with speech and language disabilities. This can buy them a lot of different ways again. Whether it's kind of in that internationalization field or whether it's any kind of user communication things like that.