The internet age has transformed our lives in ways we could never have imagined. The web serves us across every dimension of daily life — from hobbies and social connections all the way to business and commerce.
Barriers People with Disabilities Face on the Web
Let's start with something as basic as reading text. A sighted person can instantly tell the difference between a heading, a paragraph, a quote, and so on. But what about a blind user? In the best case, the text is "live" text and a screen reader can read it aloud. But what if the site owner uploads an image that contains text — say, a scanned flyer they also hand out in mailboxes? No assistive technology currently available can read text embedded inside an image. If the site owner or developer hasn't added settings that describe the image, all that text becomes completely inaccessible.
What about video? Today roughly 35% of all internet traffic is video. If the media player controls are not accessible to a blind user, there's no way to know which button is PLAY and which is STOP. And how is a deaf user supposed to follow a lecture with no captions?
Then there's site navigation. A person living with Parkinson's disease may not be able to use a mouse at all. If proper keyboard-navigation settings aren't in place, that person simply cannot browse the web. So many barriers — and yet they could disappear if we as UX professionals, designers, content writers, and developers put in just a little extra effort and bake accessibility principles into everything we build.
Accessibility principles — which I'll cover in greater detail in another article on this site — provide clear guidelines for doing things right. These principles exist as guidelines rather than rigid rules because, when it comes to websites, there is often more than one correct way to handle a given situation.