Keith is a father and grandfather, a minister, and has been counseling troubled youth for over 30 years. He's a diehard sports fan and spends his nights and weekends announcing games for the local college's football, volleyball, basketball, and baseball teams.
As a self-described technology buff, you'll never find Keith without his iPhone. He loves taking pictures, especially of his new grandson. If you were to add Keith on Facebook, you could practically watch the boy grow up in his news feed.
Few people are as well traveled as Keith, who's forever on a mission to become "mayor of everywhere" on Foursquare. Accompanying him on his adventures is his guide dog, a beautiful Black Labrador Retriever named Mercury.
Keith is blind.
Too often we forget to put a face on the people with disabilities. We lump them into categories:
- Blindness or Low Vision
- Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing
- Learning Disabilities
- Medical Disabilities
- Physical Disabilities
While these categories are conditions, they do not describe the individuals. They certainly do not describe Keith.
Accessibility is something that is relevant for everyone working with websites regardless of whether you are a web designer, web developer, web manager, or web editor. As website specialists, we like to think we are pretty good at defining our audiences.
Did you know that 20% of your users have some form of disability? One person out of five visiting your site has to do something out of the ordinary to get the information you've made available. Let's look at this a different way-for every 1000 visitors, 200 may have difficulty with your site, or need an alternative way to get to your information. Alternative ways may include screen readers or screen magnifiers, braille readers, or keyboard only navigation.
When you and your team redesigned your site the last time, did your UX designer include people with disabilities in the personas used for the site's redesign? If you are not familiar with a persona, here is a brief description from Wikipedia:
"In marketing and user-centered design, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way."
Personas are just one tool that can help with creating websites; to be effective your personas need to accurately reflect your visitors. If possible, engage a person with a disability to assist with persona creation, then re-engage your expert when it's time to start testing the changes you've made to your site.
When you meet Keith, (or Bill, Sarah, or any other disabled person) for the first time, be sure to ask how much the grandson is growing, how their favorite sports team is doing, or about their latest hobby. If it's Keith, be prepared to stop and chat for a while. He's got some pictures to show you!
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