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We’ve collected experiences from web users with disabilities for years, and the thing that stands out isn’t outrage. It’s specificity. People with disabilities know exactly what’s wrong with websites and exactly what would fix it.
Callum Gamble, who is neurodivergent with autism, told us that long stretches of unbroken text wear him down — that after a while he’s “no longer able to process the text as it becomes wavy on the screen.”
That’s not a preference. That’s a description of how reading works for him, offered with more precision than most usability reports manage.
Suman Damera, who is blind, made a list for us of the ordinary things he does online: banking, booking flights, ordering food, filing taxes, applying for jobs, tracking a package, scheduling a doctor. The unremarkable business of running a life.
His point wasn’t that any one of those sites failed him. It was the fatigue of accumulation. With so many sites unusable or difficult to use, he is “not able to do all of the things to live an independent, dignified life.”
Neither Callum nor Suman speaks for everyone with a disability. That’s rather the point — people with disabilities are not a monolith with a shared list of demands. They’re individual users with expertise about their own needs, which is precisely the expertise most web teams never ask for.
And It’s Not Only About Disability
The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative makes this point plainly: accessible design also helps people with temporary injuries, people in bright sunlight or a loud room, people on slow or expensive connections, people getting older.
Captions exist for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. They’re also why you can watch a video on a loud train or in a quiet Dr’s office.
Good contrast exists for people with low vision. It’s also why you can read your phone outdoors.
None of that makes accessibility a general usability upgrade that happens to help people with disabilities as a side effect. It’s the reverse: design that takes users with disabilities seriously turns out to work better for nearly everyone.
