Understanding Experiences of Users with Disabilities

A List Apart pub­lished an arti­cle a few days ago titled, What is Web Acces­si­bil­ity? by Tren­ton Moss. The arti­cle doesn’t attempt to explain any tech­ni­cal con­cept, but sim­ply to help the reader under­stand the impli­ca­tions of dif­fer­ent dis­abil­i­ties of web use. WebAIM does the same thing in their Intro­duc­tion to Web Acces­si­bil­ity by Paul Bohman, espe­cially with the accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cles on visual, hear­ing, motor and cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties listed at the bot­tom of that page, each con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion on spe­cific dis­abil­i­ties in those categories.

Under­stand­ing the nature of how dif­fer­ent dis­abil­i­ties affect web use (as opposed to sim­ply under­stand­ing acces­si­ble cod­ing prac­tices) is essen­tial in order to ensure your site is really acces­si­ble. If you have a solid under­stand­ing of what bar­ri­ers your vis­i­tors might encounter then there may be occa­sions when it would be okay to break a gen­er­ally accepted rule or a need to go beyond what is required by accepted guidelines.

So can these per­spec­tives be gained? I think a good place to start would be to talk to per­sons who might encounter some of the bar­ri­ers from inac­ces­si­ble design, ask them ques­tions about their expe­ri­ences. Arti­cles such as those men­tioned above can be help­ful, as well as online sim­u­la­tions such as these from WebAIM (Screen Reader, Low-vision and Cog­ni­tive), a vision sim­u­la­tion from the State of Ver­mont or a color blind­ness sim­u­la­tion from Vischeck.

Other ideas on how to gain this perspective?