The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that I should have wound up working in digital environments. As an individual who has been severely hard of hearing since two years of age, I’ve experienced a rapid progression of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and most recently, with compliance online. With wide-spread acceptance of W3C standards, website readers for the blind have greater potential to work well for its users. Quicktime has recently added a function that allows for compatible movies to be encoded with captioning for the deaf, a leap that I have awaited for too long (it remains to be seen how many movies will actually take advantage of it).

Don’t forget about us, designers and coders. The disabled community wants to use the internet and its internet-related services as much as the next group of people do. The best place to understand the myriad issues involved is on W3’s site, which has excellent literature about navigating the needs of disabled users, such as How People with Disabilities Use the Web. There are things covered in here that I never even thought about until I read it, like the fact that colorblind people find it impossible to shop for clothing online. Imagine if you were to go to your favorite outlet, only to find that everything’s been replaced with black and white photos, without a clerk in sight. How could you possibly choose? You may like the design, but how can you tell about the color if it’s not been written anywhere. This is just one possible scenario that W3’s document covers.

To speak from my own experience, though, the internet is an alternate reality in every possible sense for me. Online, I have no disability: I chat with others without once having to ask them to repeat themselves, I can order dinner for delivery without ever having to bungle it up over the phone, and if I’m ever asked to go out to the theaters to watch a movie, I can read up about it beforehand online so I’m not completely lost.

For people who have disabilities like myself, the internet has become a tool to improve lives, giving individuals many ways to overcome challenges in a world that may not be prepared to assist them fully. Let’s all try to make sure our code is compliant and our design is accessible!