Week 1 Understanding disability issues when designing Web sites

First of all, you need to know what is the four main categories of disability. They are visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive and learning disabilities.

For visual disability, it is best to use multiple attributes. For example, if both color and a fill pattern are used on different bars on a graph, they can be viewed in either color or black and white. Instead of using size attributes on the font element to denote a heading, the heading element should be used to correctly mark up a heading so that assistive technology can identify headings.

For hearing disability, the primary concern is to ensure that audio output information is provided in a redundant equivalent visual form.e.g.blinking error messages

For cognitive and learning disabilities, Web developer can reuse the same layout and design for each page, so a person with a cognitive disability can more easily navigate through a Web site.

Just remember that creating a Web site that is accessible by people with disabilities is relatively easy as long as the Web developer and author follow some basic guidelines. Sometimes, we try to design with lots of complex graphics and multimedia applications to enhance the look of the web site. However, these kinds of things will become new problem and barriers of people with disability browsing web site. So, think about it.

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