Access to the Web for People with Intellectual Disabilities

If you are look­ing for infor­ma­tion on how to make craft more acces­si­ble web­sites for per­sons with cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties, here are a few posts on the topic:

• Cog­ni­tive Dis­abil­i­ties, WebAIM
• Cog­ni­tive Dis­abil­i­ties and the Web: Where Acces­si­bil­ity and Usabil­ity Meet?, Heather Mariger (2006)
• Cog­ni­tive and Learn­ing Dis­abil­ity Matrix, Joe Clark (2006)
• Devel­op­ing sites for users with Cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties and learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties, Roger Hud­son, Russ Weak­ley and Peter Firminger (2005)
• Design­ing for Users With Cog­ni­tive Dis­abil­i­ties, Erica Kolatch (2000)

All of the above guide­lines and sug­ges­tions are essen­tial and rel­e­vant to any dis­cus­sion on web acces­si­bil­ity. That said, is is also impor­tant to take a step back and look at who we are talk­ing about when we refer to users with intel­lec­tual disabilities.

Intel­lec­tual dis­abil­ity is also referred to as men­tal retar­da­tion, devel­op­men­tal dis­abil­ity or cog­ni­tive dis­abil­ity (which seems to be the pre­ferred term in the web design world) and has elicited a num­ber of “offi­cial” def­i­n­i­tions. Intel­lec­tual dis­abil­ity is found with dis­abil­i­ties such as Down syn­drome, Frag­ile X, autism, and cere­bral palsy, among many others.

Who do you think of when dis­cussing intel­lec­tual dis­abil­ity? I think first of my two younger broth­ers Patrick and Dallin who were both born with Down syn­drome. You may think of a fam­ily mem­ber, a coworker or some­one at your local gro­cery store and each per­son you think of may have a wide vari­ety of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics and abilities.

Undoubt­edly when a per­son with an intel­lec­tual dis­abil­ity gets online, there are many bar­ri­ers to be over­come. How­ever, there are also many bar­ri­ers that keep peo­ple with intel­lec­tual dis­abil­i­ties from get­ting online in the first place. Here are just a few:

• Basic com­puter skills

  For many per­sons with intel­lec­tual dis­abil­i­ties a deci­sion is made early on whether to focus more on aca­d­e­mic skills or on func­tional skills to best pre­pare for life after grad­u­a­tion. Basic com­puter skills may be entirely left out of the curriculum.

• Liv­ing arrangements

  For any num­ber of rea­sons, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple with intel­lec­tual dis­abil­i­ties live in long-term care facil­i­ties where com­put­ers and/or the inter­net may not be available.

• Expec­ta­tions, or rather lack thereof

  Low expec­ta­tions may come from the per­son with a dis­abil­ity, a fam­ily mem­ber or care­giver and can be very powerful.

• Poverty

  “In the year 2004, an esti­mated 28.2 per­cent of civil­ian non-institutionalized, men and women with a work lim­i­ta­tion, aged 18–64 in the United States lived in fam­i­lies with incomes below the poverty line.” (www.disabilitystatistics.org- login required). If you had to choose between pay­ing for elec­tric­ity or your Inter­net ser­vice, which would you choose? (In case you are waf­fling on that one, remem­ber that it is dif­fi­cult to turn on a com­puter with­out electricity…)

For­tu­nately, there are some elec­tronic and soci­etal ramps in place to help over­come some of these bar­ri­ers– gov­ern­ment and pri­vate pro­grams that pro­vide finan­cial and job train­ing sup­port, spe­cial­ized edu­ca­tion pro­grams, self-advocacy efforts and a rapid expan­sion of unin­ten­tion­ally intel­lec­tual dis­abil­ity friendly web­sites. Per­sons with intel­lec­tual dis­abil­i­ties may or may not be able to do their bank­ing online just yet, but the explo­sion of visual media has opened door for all kinds of acces­si­ble online expe­ri­ences. I’ll refer again to my brother Dallin who has become extremely pro­fi­cient in using a vari­ety of online tools to find images, audio and video of his much beloved Power Rangers.

Let’s keep work­ing on mak­ing the web acces­si­ble for every­one, but on occa­sion it is help­ful to stop and con­sider just who that ‘every­one’ is.

To close, a quote from a paper pro­duced by the Inter­net Soci­ety titled Global Trends that will Impact Uni­ver­sal Access to Infor­ma­tion Resources:

The ben­e­fits of address­ing the prob­lems of inac­ces­si­ble design extend to include all peo­ple, includ­ing the com­mu­nity of peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. (About 10% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion are dis­abled, with a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount falling into the poor pop­u­la­tion in emerg­ing economies). It is imper­a­tive that there be some way to insure that peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties in the devel­op­ing world are not sep­a­rated from every­one else. There must not be even more of a Dig­i­tal Divide opened between peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties and the efforts to pro­vide Inter­net access to all in emerg­ing economies. Once it is under­stood that acces­si­ble design is always in synch with low tech­nol­ogy solu­tions, then big steps can be made to help every­one gain access to the infor­ma­tion society.

See Also:

• The Grow­ing Dig­i­tal Divide in Access for Peo­ple with Dis­abil­i­ties: Over­com­ing Bar­ri­ers to Par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Cyn­thia D. Wad­dell, (1999)
• Nomadic­ity, Dis­abil­ity Access, and the Every-Citizen Inter­face, Gregg C. Van­der­hei­den (1997)