Accessibility Awareness

Content creators can gain an appreciation of technology accessibility by exploring technologies and methods people with disabilities use to access them. Technologies covered here include websites, documents, audio, video, and other digital content.

Explore these resources to learn about how people with disabilities access digital content and assistive technology.

A Personal Look at Accessibility in Higher Education

This video from The National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE) highlights the experiences of students and faculty with disabilities in higher education.

How people with disabilities use the web

Each individual is unique. People have diverse abilities, skills, tools, preferences, and expectations that can impact how they use the digital technology. For instance, consider the following aspects:

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 disabilities?

Resources

These W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) resources introduce how people with disabilities access and use digital content, including the web.

  • Stories of Web Users – stories of selected scenarios of people with disabilities using the web, to highlight the effect of barriers and the broader benefits of accessible websites and web tools.
  • Diverse Abilities and Barriers – explores the wide range of diversity of people and abilities, and highlights some of the types of barriers that people commonly encounter due to inaccessible design.
  • Tools and Techniques – introduces some of the techniques and tools that people with disabilities use to interact with the web, such as browser settings, text-to-speech, voice recognition, and many more.

Working Together: People with Disabilities and Computer Technology

In the video, Working Together: People with Disabilities and Computer Technology, high school and college students with a wide variety of disabilities share their experiences using computers and demonstrate the technology used.

This information is provided by The University of Washington’s DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology).

Resources

Accessibility Organizations and Resources