What Are the Disabilities?

People interacting with web pages can have many different disabilities which should be taken into account when designing web pages:

Visual impairment: including total blindness, limited vision, and colour blindness. Often these people use special programs to read text from the screen, or magnify parts of the screen. They also may choose to override your colours with high-contrast colour schemes, or override your font selections with larger fonts.
Hearing impairment: especially important for multimedia-based applications. They may require text transcripts of audio information if that information is important to your site. This also applies to people using computers with no sound card available.
Mobility problems: including difficulty in using a keyboard or a mouse. These people often find it impossible to use a mouse, and instead have to use the keyboard. Imagine trying to use your web site if you could only use your keyboard, and could only type one key at a time.
Cognitive problems: For example, dyxlexia. These people may have difficulty reading moving or flashing text. This also applies to people with visual problems. Also, screen readers cannot read moving text well.
Neurological Problems: for example Epilepsy. It is possible that blinking text or other rapidly flashing information on a web site could trigger epileptic seizures.

Please send comments about this course to Kevin.Lowey@Usask.CA