Technics for Accessibility
We should respect an individual’s preference that with understanding the 5 forms of disabilities, and figure out the solutions for each one.
We found stunning statistics that most people don’t recognize is that 70% of disabilities are hidden, they’re invisible.
Many employees with disabilities will cover a disability in the work. We found an amazing statistic 75% of people with dyslexia do not tell their employer. They’re not asking to part of training or performance reviews.
We will cover in this article some of the suggestions and solutions for each disability.
Vision Disability
Approximately 12 million people 40 years and over in the United States have vision impairment, including 1 million who are blind, 3 million who have vision impairment after correction, and 8 million who have vision impairment due to uncorrected refractive error.
Solutions:
01- Includes screen reading technologies.
02- Braille interaction.
03- Use your mouse to move around the zoomed environment.
04- Impairment is a high contrast mode and Dark mood.
Hearing Disability
Over 5% of the world’s population — or 430 million people — require rehabilitation to address their ‘disabling’ hearing loss (432 million adults and 34 million children). It is estimated that by 2050 over 700 million people — or one in every ten people — will have disabling hearing loss
Solutions:
01- Using sign language during a video call.
02- Opt for simple backgrounds or blurred backgrounds.
03- Make sure to record your meetings as video.
04- Mute when you’re not speaking and certainly avoid talking over one another.
05- Auto captions are available in so many places, such as video platforms like Teams or Google Meet there’s Microsoft Translator. This really is your safety net.
06- Include VTT this simply means a file that serves as the timestamped text captions for your video.
07- Encourage you to ask for a captioned video. They’re so much easier and secure to produce than ever before.
Physical Disability
Motor disability covers limb disabilities, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, hemiplegia, muscular dystrophies, and spinal cord injury.
Solutions:
01- Word prediction.
02- Dictation.
03- Provide keyboard shortcuts.
Cognition Disability
Dyslexia will often be your highest performer when it comes to communication and creativity. If you can remove the barriers they face daily with reading and writing, you will unlock more time for even greater productivity and success.
Solutions:
01- Read Aloud.
02- Check out Reading Supports This is available in Edge, in Office, in OneNote.
03- Increased spacing between words, syllables separated with markers, picture symbol support.
04- Dyslexia-friendly color filters, and line focus.
05- Check out Editor and Aided Spellchecking.
06- Subtitles, are not just for people who are hard of hearing, they also really help with literacy.
Mental Health Disability
One in six people experienced a mental health problem in the last week. We would include depression, anxiety, PTSD, stress, and sleep problems here. If not addressed, our technology can exacerbate mental health problems. Consider for a moment that 87% of people now read work emails outside of work hours. 30% of people check their inbox and their social media before they get out of bed in the morning. 55% of adults say they are overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to take in. We should have this conversation in the workplace.
Solutions:
01- Quiet hours in chat applications like Microsoft Teams.
02- Allow yourself to watch meeting recordings.
03- Monitor your own personal work habits and let the AI suggest some actions.
04- Turn on your nightlight on your PC and your phone. This removes the blue light that can interfere with your sleep.
Conclusion
Accessibility is a team effort between designers, developers, and content creators, to create an accessible environment. as a team we have to understand and supporting neurodiversity in the Workplace.
Creating accessible sites can be intimidating, yet adhering to these constraints creates better sites for all users. These are only a few of the many ways that you can start creating accessible designs.
