Experience Lab

Skills that people use every day, like talking, typing, writing, or walking, become automatic, and rely on the brain’s implicit muscle memory. This memory is largely unconscious but very important in completing everyday tasks without spending lots of effort thinking about how to interact with the world. Some cognitive disabilities result because of changes to the brain - like those caused by traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) or strokes. They can cause impairments to these functions. Relearning these simple, implicit skills can be incredibly challenging.

People who are deaf or hard of hearing communicate in many ways. Some rely on visual information, such as captions and sign language. Others will use their residual hearing to listen to audio information – often using some kind of assistive listening device. In addition to captions, consider providing a version of the video with an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter.

Mobility impairment is a broad category of physical disabilities that include upper limb and manual dexterity disabilities, loss of fine-motor control, and disabling conditions such as cerebral palsy and carpal tunnel syndrome. The disabilities may be temporary or permanent; they may range in severity from mild loss of fine-motor control to quadriplegia; they may be the consequence of aging, accident, heredity, disease. Users may have limited arm or hand movement, use just one hand, have a tremor, have difficulty with fine movements, or be unable to hold a mouse.

Although it’s true that most blind people do have some degree of vision, for all intents and purposes, one can say that people who are blind do not use their eyes to access the web, because whatever vision they have is not useful enough for this kind of task. This means that a computer monitor and mouse would be much less useful to a person who is blind. It’s not that blind people are incapable of moving or clicking a mouse; it’s just that they don’t know where to move it or when to click it, since they can’t see what’s on the screen.  As a result, most blind computer users rely on the keyboard for navigation and key structural cues to understand the content.