Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users and Web Accessibility

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Web Accessibility

The World Wide Web has rapidly become a key tool for information and service delivery. Deaf and hard of hearing people face specific barriers in accessing and using the web. The Web also plays a key role in the provision of eGovernment services. This section discusses the requirements of deaf and hard of hearing people in general as well as with regard to eGovernment specifically.

Thanks to campaigning by disability organisations and other user groups, and increasingly driven by legislative pressures to make web sites and web based services more inclusive, the topic of web accessibility and usability has bee climbing up the agenda of designers and site owners.

However, deaf and hard of hearing people are all too often not recognised as stakeholders in this matter, rather people assume that web accessibility is something only of interest to blind and partially sighted people, colour blind citizens or those who do not use a standard mouse and keyboard to surf the web.

That is a fundamentally incorrect assumption. While there is little doubt that blind people are the most disenfranchised users of the web, there are also significant challenges that deaf and hard of hearing people face on the web.

The Challenges in brief

A paper available from this site discusses the issues in more detail, but the major barriers that deaf and hard of hearing people encounter when using the web can be summarised as follows:

  • Multimedia content: there is ever more audio and video content on the web. Clearly, for many deaf and hard of hearing people the audio might not be accessible. Subtitles, transcripts and sign language interpretation are all ways of addressing this.
  • Lack of plain language: some groups of deaf and hard of hearing people will find non-plain language challenging. Some sign languages, like for example British Sign Language (BSL) are not based on the spoken language of the land. Unless content is in plain language, these user groups will find your site inaccessible.

Sign language on your website

There are many cases where users of sign language would benefit greatly from having content available to them in signed format. Especially for local and national government sites and other sides of general interest, the presentation of key materials in sign language is strongly encouraged, in addition to taking wider steps to make the site fully accessible and usable by as many people as possible.

Organisations like RNID can help you create such content and putting it on your website in a way that it is viewable by as many users as possible. Click here for more information and contact details.

More information

There is a lot of information available about web accessibility. We suggest that you start by looking at the following sources: