It is important to understand the needs, preferences and abilities of potential users of your website. User profiles help to develop this understanding. They illustrate the common issues faced by users and any assistive technologies they might use.
There are five main categories of impairment to consider. These are vision impairment; motor difficulties, cognitive and learning; deaf and hard of hearing, and elderly users.
Vision impairment
- Users with mild vision impairment, e.g. users who might enlarge text in the browser with high contrast and use colour preferences
- Users with medium vision impairment, e.g. users of magnification software. Magnification users are hindered by images of text (which become pixelated at high resolutions).
- Users with severe vision impairment, e.g. users of screen reader software. Screen reader users typically have issues with poorly labelled images, or links which don’t make sense when read out of context.
Motor difficulties
- Users with mild motor difficulties, e.g. users who might use a mouse or equivalent adaptive technology but who might have fine mouse control difficulties. Link size is an important issue for this group of users.
- Users with medium motor difficulties or upper limb disorder, e.g. users who might only use a keyboard, a mouse being too difficult to use. Keyboard users have issues with navigation or forms that don’t have a logical tab order.
- Users with severe motor difficulties, e.g. users who are quadriplegic who might use voice recognition software.
Cognitive and learning dificulties
- Users with medium dyslexia, e.g. users who might change site colours and text formatting, and who in many cases might supplement this with text to speech software for reading sections of text.
- Users with mild to medium learning or cognitive disabilities, e.g. users who might benefit from the inclusion of descriptive images to help explain content or who use a symbol browser to convert web pages to symbols or have no special access methodologies and rely on someone else assisting them.
Deaf and hard of hearing
Deaf or hard of hearing users (or people in a noisy environment) benefit from text captions to multimedia presentations
British Sign Language (BSL) users are especially relevant if there is multimedia content on the site or language issues.
Older users
- Older people can suffer from physical disabilities, such as a restricted ability to move their arms and/or hands. They might experience difficulty using a mouse.
- The performance of the eye diminishes with age and can lead to decreased visual acuity, contrast or colour sensitivity, reduced field of vision, or an increased sensitivity to glare. Older people that have such visual impairments tend to find it difficult to point to specific objects on the screen and click on small icons with the mouse.
- Older people that suffer from a reduced spatial ability and a decline in memory might find it difficult to navigate deep hierarchies of a web site.
It should be pointed out that the above categorisation is purely for illustrative purposes. In reality, users may have a combination of impairments. For example, older users may have a combination of reduced vision, restricted mobility and decline in memory.