Disabled user groups

What kind of disabled users groups are considered?

The following is a brief list describing several disabled user groups. This list does not cover every possible type of disability, it merely covers those which are well known and any potential barriers they may encounter of the web:
Blind/visually impaired
  • Unable to distinguish between the obvious regions of a page at a glance (headings/navigation/content/frames). Unlike someone with sight.
  • Navigation could prove impossible or very difficult.
  • Navigation could become repetitive and frustrating when trying to reach the pages actual content.
  • Photographic and image content have no meaning unless they have been designed properly.
  • Emphasis on text and other content may not be noticed through colour, etc.
  • Animations without descriptive text or audio would not accessible.
Deaf/Hard of hearing
  • Any sort of video or animation on the web with sound or speech would be inaccessible unless either captions or alternative was provided.
  • Cinemas, for example, run films with subtitles at certain time. This group can still enjoy films so a site which fails to show captions on movie trailers would be neglecting this group.
  • Any site (I’ve yet to come across one but would love to see one) which requires speech recognition would present a problem for some users of this group.
  • Any sort of audio cue would be completely missed.
Cognitive/neurological disabilities
  • Complex sites would present great problems.
  • This would include sites with: unclear navigation (the kind where you have to hover a shape for text to appear), a large amount of links, several different types of navigation, multiple columns full of information, large paragraphs, inconsistent page layout, detailed background images, etc.
  • Animations/scrolling/flashing content would distract the user making it difficult to focus on the rest of the page – or difficult to use animated menu.
  • Constant audio could distract and confuse the user.
People who are not computer literate also have difficulties when using the internet. By improving the accessibility and usability of your web site everyone will benifit.