Types of disabilities and impairments

When we talk about impairments, limitations and disabilities, they will fall into one of six categories.

Auditory

Hearing impairments can include people who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as sign language users and lip-readers.

Users with a hearing impairment benefit from subtitles on videos, and transcripts for audio content.

Visual

People who have a visual impairment can be blind, or colour blind, but can also just include glasses-wearers and people with cataracts.

Users with a visual impairment benefit from high text contrast, image descriptions (Alternative text) and allowing web pages to be read aloud using a special technology which we’ll learn more about later.

Motor

Motor impairments and limitations can include users with arthritis, motor neuron disease and Parkinsons for example, but there’s plenty of other conditions that can fall into this category. People with a limb difference or spinal cord injuries are other examples.

These users often rely on technologies like eye-tracker tools and special keyboards to navigate websites.

Cognitive, learning and neurological

Users with cognitive impairments include those with dyslexia, learning difficulties and people who are neurodiverse.

It can also include people with epilepsy, so content with lots of flashing and moving parts or text that’s quite wordy and hard to read can be quite difficult to navigate for these users.

Mental

Mental health issues like anxiety, depression and dementia can also affect how someone uses the internet or digital products.

A person’s mental health affects how they think, feel and react, and finding information online should avoid increasing mental distress. Content that is easy to understand, read and navigate is really important for this reason.

Variable

Finally, variable impairments simply means that a person can have a combination of these different additional needs and the impact of them on their daily life can depend on several factors, like the day or even the situation they’re in.

Permanent, temporary and situational impairments

It’s really important to remember that not all impairments are permanent, and when we create accessible content we’re also helping people who don’t even have a disability. 

So you don’t need to be deaf to benefit from subtitles. And when we consider how many people in total would benefit from the same subtitles on that video, it’s a lot.

Remember: It’s not the person, but the environment that disables them.