There are many different ways in which humans are diverse, including physical and mental ability, too. It’s important to keep in mind that not everyone has the same physical and mental ability as you. Buildings, streets, and society are generally built around the assumption that all people have the same abilities, be that the ability to walk up stairs, hear the audio on a video, or hold information in their working memory while trying to solve mental math. The truth is that differences in ability are all around us, and we can’t assume that everyone in the classroom can do the same things.

You Can’t Always Tell

Many people assume that disability is easily visible. For example, you might picture a person in a wheelchair when you think of a mobile disability, or a person with a seeing eye dog when you think about blindness. However, many people’s disabilities are not readily obvious to an outside observer. Let’s consider an example. Imagine you’re riding your bicycle down the street on your way to campus in the morning. You might call out to a cyclist up ahead, “on your left!”, to let them know you’re about to pass them, and that you need them to move over. When they don’t move over to give you room, your might just assume they are rude and ignoring you. However, you wouldn’t necessarily know by seeing them that they are deaf. Maybe they simply could not hear you call out, and instead they use a rearview mirror to see cars and other cyclists approaching from behind them.

Types of Disability

According to WebAIM, a leader in web accessibility, one in four adults in the United States has a disability.^[1] Common physical disabilities include motor disabilities, visual disabilities, auditory disabilities, and cognitive disabilities. Some people are born with their disabilities, and some people develop them over time due to aging, disease, or even accidents. Here is a short list of disabilities and neurodivergence that you, other students in your classroom, or other people in your community may be living with:

• partial or full blindness
• partial or full deafness
• inability to use body parts like legs, hands, or arms
• attention-deficit hyperactive disorder or attention-deficit disorder
• autism spectrum disorder
• major depressive disorder

Disability spans a wide range of experiences, and every person’s needs and preferences will be different. Keeping this diversity in mind will go a long ways toward helping you understand yourself and the people in your community at school and elsewhere.

Accessibility on College Campuses

The idea of accessibility is an important force of change on college campuses today. Accessibility is about making education accessible to all, and and it’s particularly focused on providing educational support to a diverse group of students, faculty, and staff with disabilities. According to the American with Disabilities Act, you can be considered disabled if you meet one of the following criteria:

• You have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, such as seeing, hearing, walking, learning, and others.
• You must have a history of such impairment.
• Others perceive that you have such impairment.

If you meet one of these criteria, you have special legal rights to certain accommodations on your campus. These accommodations may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• academic accommodations, like alternate format for print materials; classroom captioning; arranging for priority registration; reducing a course load; substituting one course for another; providing note takers; recording devices; sign language interpreters; a TTY in your dorm room; and equipping school computers with screen-reading, voice recognition, or other adaptive software or hardware.
• exam accommodations, like extended time on exams
• financial support and assistance
• priority access to housing
• transportation and access, like wheelchair-accessible community shuttles

Assistive Technology and Web Accessibility

Assistive technologies and web-accessibility accommodations are critical in today’s technology-driven economy and society. The following are some examples of assistive technologies:

• speech-recognition and other assistive software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, Kurzweil, Zoom Text, CCTV Magnifier, and Inspiration Software
• computer input devices, like keyboards, electronic pointing devices, sip-and-puff systems, wands and sticks, joysticks, trackballs, and touch screens
• other web-accessibility aids, like screen readers, screen enlargers, and screen magnifiers, speech recognition or voice recognition programs, and text-to-speech (TTS) or speech synthesizers

Students in the following video share some of their experiences with web accessibility.

You can view the transcript for “Experiences of Students with Disabilities” here (opens in new window).

For more information about web accessibility, visit http://webaim.org/.