What do people with disability really think about accessibility?

In June, Safia Abdalla asked people with disability via Twitter what they found hardest about using websites and accessing information online. The response to her original tweet, “I’m curious to know. If you have a disability, what’s the hardest thing about browsing the web?” has produced an eye-opening list of what accessibility really means to people with disability.

While many of the comments people made to Abdalla’s tweet should be addressed if you follow the online accessibility standards and formal guidelines like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), there are plenty that fall outside of these guides. As well as plenty that are affected by an individual’s preferences or abilities. This is a reminder that every person and their ability is different and that things affect them in different ways.

Hampus Sethfors, writing for Axess Lab, compiled a list of the most commented on issues and problems that people are having online from the replies to Abdalla’s tweet. The top issue raised, by far, was the lack of captions on videos. This was commented on by not only people who are deaf or hearing impaired but also as an issue for others including people with autism.

The other most commented on issues were:

• Moving elements and animation in a webpage can be irritating and distracting for anyone, but make things particularly difficult for people with cognitive impairments.
• A lot of people, especially those with dyslexia or cognitive impairments, commented about the difficulty for them of reading and taking in information from large chunks and paragraphs of text.
• Small font size is understandably an issue for many people with low levels of vision, although there is surprisingly no minimum font size requirement in WCAG.

• People with low vision continue to experience layout and navigation problems on a website when zooming in or increasing font-size.
• Low levels of contrast and images of text in a page are still creating a lot of problems for people. This is something that has been an essential element of accessibility for a long time but is still not being followed.
• Bright colour schemes are still being used, despite being a big problem for many people with low vision.
• People who cannot differentiate between colours, continue to face the impossible task of trying to use a site where colour is relied upon for navigation and linking options.
• Sites that can only be navigated with a mouse are making it impossible for the many people who need to use a keyboard or touch screen to manoeuvre through them. Every site should be built to accommodate this from the start.
• Small touch or click targets and buttons are making it difficult for people who are using a touch or small screen, especially if they have any motor control issues.
• Captchas! These are annoying for most people but are impossible to complete for many who are visually impaired or for those with learning disabilities.

Web accessibility is vital if you want to make your online information available and easy to use for the largest number of people. And when it isn’t right it affects users with all sorts of different disabilities and in a wide range of different ways. And, as Sethfors says in his conclusion: “Basically everything that people with disabilities comment on are things that annoy everyone, so fixing these issues makes your interface better for all users!”

If you follow WCAG to the letter, many of the issues people commented on above will be fixed or improved but there are also plenty of things that people struggle with that aren’t included in the guidelines. How do you overcome these? Make sure you test your sites widely with people with all sorts of abilities.

At the Information Access Group, we prioritise the user experience when designing and developing websites. We also undertake user testing on our projects to ensure we meet the needs of a diverse range of users.

You can read Hampus Sethfors’s full article on the Axess Lab website and Safia Abdalla’s original tweet and reply thread by linking to her tweet above.