They’re not my visitors
We often design and build for a perfect user in a perfect setting: someone who’s young, healthy, full of energy, tech-savvy, well-rested, sitting in a quiet room, free from distractions, not hungover, sipping coffee, and with all the time in the world.
But is that your visitor, is that even you?
For example: did you ever watch a video in a full, noisy train, and you forgot your headset? Wouldn’t it be nice to have captioning of the spoken text of the video.
Consider these people
- Cheyenne has arthritis and cannot use a mouse, She uses a keyboard but cannot activate a hamburger menu.
- Carel has Parkinson’s disease. His hands are not steady enough to mouse-click on a link with tiny text.
- Louis uses a screen reader. He struggles to understand a page’s content because its markup has no logical heading structure.
- Kaia is blind. Links that are an image or an icon font, with no link text, are effectively invisible to her.
- Carlos is color blind. He can’t distinguish the red links from the black text.
- Ray is in his 60s. His eyesight has degraded. He can no longer read small grey text on top a darker grey background.
- Braiden has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). A distracting animation in the sidebar, with no user-control for stopping, prevents her from focusing on the page content.
- Alyssa is deaf. A video without subtitles is unusable to her.
- Yurem has Down syndrome. He can’t comprehend the content of a webpage because the writing is unnecessarily complicated.
- Jabari lives in Western Africa. He has a slow Internet connection. Sites bloated with heavy scripts and images keep him from browsing a substantial portion of the Web.
These people, and many more like them, already face lots of life challenges. By adopting the a11y best practices you can ensure your website does not add their challenges.
Resources
- Blind people don’t visit my website by The A11Y Collective.