Day 57: Comparing AT and Strategies of People with Disabilities

Published on 26 Jan 2019

• journal
• was
• people

Before I move into the "Identifying accessibility issues/problems" section of the WAS Body of Knowledge, I needed to recap for myself what I learned this week about people with different types of disabilities, the barriers they run into, strategies and assistive tech they use to overcome barriers, and the WCAG principles that benefit each one. I ended up with an imperfect table visualization as I tried organizing my thoughts on what I'd learned this past week, as well as the entirety of the past 56 days.

• Started a new spreadsheet to compare disabilities, assistive tech, and strategies. (it is not complete, as I'm still attempting to hash out the ideas that fit together)

It's no easy task trying to visualize comparisons (in table format) of disability types and strategies used to interact with the web. For one, pigeon-holing any disability is tough, due to the nature of variety within any disability type. And organizing that information for me to better understand what strategies and assistive tech may be used in different instances really challenged me in considering what the best way was to approach this visualization. My personal cheat sheet as a 2D table doesn't do the information justice. There are experts out there who have likely wrestled with this themselves.

Assigning the WCAG principles to each instance helped me really think about why these principles were developed and how invaluable they are to many people in a very real and personal way.