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WAI: Strategies, guidelines, resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities

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2. Designing for Inclusion
   1. » How People with Disabilities Use the Web
      1. Stories of Web Users
      2. Diversity of Web Users
      3. Diversity in Web Use
      4. Accessibility Principles
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• Over­view
• Sto­ries of Web Users
• Di­ver­sity of Web Users
• Di­ver­sity in Web Use
• Ac­ces­si­bil­ity Prin­ci­ples

[DRAFT] How People with Disabilities Use the Web: Overview

Introduction

How do people who cannot move their arms use your website? What about people who cannot see well or at all? Or people who have difficulty hearing or understanding, or have other accessibility needs?

This resource introduces how people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments, use the Web. It describes tools and approaches that people with different kinds of disabilities use to browse the Web and the design barriers they encounter on the Web. It helps developers, designers, and others to understand the principles for creating accessible websites, web applications, browsers, and other web tools.

This resource includes the following pages:

• Stories of Web Users - stories of selected scenarios of people with disabilities using the Web, to highlight the effect of barriers and the broader benefits of accessible websites and web tools.
• Diversity of Web Users - explores the wide range of diversity of people and abilities, and highlights some of the types of barriers that people commonly encounter from inaccessible design.
• Diversity in Web Use - introduces some of the techniques and tools that people with disabilities use to interact with the Web, such as browser settings, text-to-speech, voice recognition, and many more.
• Accessibility Principles - introduces some of the web accessibility requirements and provides references to the international accessibility standards from W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Tips:

• There are additional supporting materials available on the Web, such as videos of how people with disabilities use the Web .
• For instructions on how to customize your particular web browser and computer setup, see Better Web Browsing: Tips for Customizing Your Computer.
• If you develop personas , you can use this information to help develop them, per Using WAI Material.

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Status: Draft Updated 1 August 2012. [changelog]
Editor: Shadi Abou-Zahra. Previous editor: Judy Brewer. Acknowledgments. Developed with the WAI-AGE Task Force and the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG). Developed as part of the WAI-AGE Project (IST 035015) funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework