From the course: Practical Accessibility for Designers

How vision impairments affect access

From the course: Practical Accessibility for Designers

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How vision impairments affect access

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- [Host] How vision impairments affect access. People who wear glasses aren't thought of as disabled. The other day, I had to go down to my hotel lobby without my glasses and it was very uncomfortable. I'm shortsighted, so the world is a blur of information without my glasses and I can't drive or watch a film without them. Yet because society has normalized glasses as an accommodation for people like me, we don't think about the fact that glasses make the world accessible for some of us. The WCAG guidelines specify that information must be presented in ways that can be perceived. Let's look at ways that vision impairment can affect how information on your website is perceived. Did you know that there are 2.2 billion people, roughly a third of the world, with some sort of near or distance vision impairment. This means people who can't see or read things clearly without the help of corrective glasses. In addition to these impairments, which can be corrected by glasses, we have more disabling situations, things that result in a range of vision loss. Blindness, which is complete loss of vision. Low vision, which can be caused by things like cataracts and glaucoma. Central peripheral vision loss is where you can't see if you're looking straight ahead or perhaps things that happen on the peripheries. And color blindness refers to being unable to see the full spectrum of colors. We're going to look at what web accessibility needs there are for people with these vision impairments. They cover navigation, how people go through website, text and typography, the content or information, the contrast of elements on the website, forms, the use of images, the use of color, and the use of UX copy. Learning how to tackle these various aspects of your website is a really important part of making your website accessible. Without that you might prevent millions of people from being able to use your website comfortably. We want to make the web as accessible for people with visual impairments as the world is for me with my glasses on.

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