eHelp
When many of us think of disabilities, we may first think of wheelchairs, reminded by the symbol used for parking and access for people with disabilities. But the average wheelchair user has no specific difficulties with web pages. There are other disabilities that can severely impair a person's ability to use a poorly-made web page.
Users who are unable to usefully view the monitor display ordinarily use a piece of software called a screen reader, which renders in voice (or in some cases Braille or other output) the text of a web page. Screen readers linearize the contents of a web page, and they rely on there being text equivalents for every piece of non-text information (such as images) on the page. The most widely used screen reader for Microsoft Windows in the United States is JAWS, from Freedom Scientific.
Many people have visual impairments that require magnification of the screen contents, ranging from slight magnification to deal with presbyopia to extreme magnification and in some cases page reordering to deal with more severe limitations. Most modern browsers can provide moderate text enlargement, and Internet Explorer 7 and Opera can magnify all elements of the page, including images, but for greater control of magnification, many users employ screen magnifiers, which have the added advantage of magnifying all applications, not just web browsers..
Color blindness is a group of mainly genetic syndromes that reduce the ability to perceive colors. Although there is specialized software that attempts to enhance color differences that would otherwise be almost imperceptible, most users with color-blindness are best accommodated by not using color as the sole method of distinguishing information on a web page.
Many web pages are silent, and present no barrier to people with impaired hearing, but any audio on the page, be it voice, music, animal noises, or whatever, needs alternate text content.
Because video ordinarily involves synchronized autio and video tracks, it provides challenges for both people with vision problems and people with hearing problems. Many people who can't hear the sound track rely on closed captioning, and people who can't see the action use audio description.
Most people "mouse around" web pages, but not everyone can use a mouse, so every web page needs to be navigable by the keyboard as well. Some users with motor disabilities employ alternative keyboards, while others use standard keyboards, sometimes with other accommodations (a person with no ability to move her hands might use a mouth stick to press keys, for example). For keyboard users, navigation is accomplished by the tab key (or some other key shortcut, depending on the browser) to move through the page, and the enter/return key to select links. Although every web page has an intrinsic tab order, that order can be modified. It is also possible to assign shortcut keys to specific links.
