Accessibility: Specific Terms

Sometimes, learning all the new vocabulary can be the most challenging part of picking up a new skill. Thankfully, there’s not a huge amount of accessibility-specific terminology. However, there are still a handful of words and abbreviations that we should know.

Disability

Disability is a broad term that can have different interpretations depending on context. For example, the way the US government defines disability in the Americans with Disabilities Act might differ from the way that disabled people choose to self-identify their experience.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a disability as “Any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions).”

This is the most relevant definition for our work in web and application accessibility.

Categories of disability

There are five major categories of disability, as defined by the Yale Usability and Web Accessibility specialists. Most people are likely to experience at least one of these types of disability at some point in their lives, even if it isn’t permanent.

Visual disability

Visual disability includes blindness, partial blindness, color blindness, blurred vision, low vision, and more. Anything that impacts a person’s ability to see to the extent that they have difficulty in their daily life is considered a visual disability.

As developers, we need to consider visual disability when we build pages so they can be used with screen readers, provide alternate descriptions of visual media (such as videos and images), and more.

Motor disability

Motor disability includes tremors, lack of fine motor control, limb loss or damage, paralyzation, and more. Anything that impacts a person’s ability to control their physical body to the point where they have difficulty in their daily life is ...