Our Heroes

surfing on the worldwide web or using digital applications is not always easy for people with disabilities. Ideally, designers, developers, and other makers of the digital web take into account the various forms of limitation during the design process. However, practice shows that unfortunately that is not always the case. The reason is that it is not aware that not everyone can do digital products in the same way.

with our series, “heroes” , we bring every restriction to the attention. In these articles we provide insight into how these people use digital applications and which tools can be used to make every digital expression more inclusive.

Browsing with a disability: Hearing impairment, what is it?

hearing impairment falls within the “auditory limitations” category. This also includes deafness, but how do the two differ from each other? In deafness, there is full hearing loss in both ears, and with hearing impairment there is reduced hearing in one or both ears.

How do digital interactions for auditory limited differences compared to the average person?

There are people with an auditory disability who can indeed hear sound. This is not always enough to understand speech (completely). Especially when there is a lot of background noise, it can be difficult for these people to follow conversations in this way. This applies, among other things, to people with hearing appliances.

What should be taken into account for people with hearing impairment?

Some people with an auditory disability are unable to read or write a written language fluently. For some, sign language is even their first language. It can help this group of people huge to present important information in sign language supported with simple language use, images, and graphs. It is also important to be aware of the group of people with an auditory disability who cannot sign language. The elderly in particular are located in this group.

Tools and “Best Practices”

If you want to enable people with auditory disabilities to also be able to use your digital product, it is important to pay attention to the following.

• Audio content : people with an auditory disability will be more difficult or even not used here to make. For example, do you have videos on your site or in your app? Then make sure that subtitles or a transcript option is present. & Nbsp;

• Media players : make sure that the media players present can display a volume controller. In addition, it is important that the text size and color of the subtitles can be adjusted.

• speech based services : every web-based service, including apps , who work exclusively with speech entry, could be a problem for auditory limited.

• Sign language : With important or difficult information, having sign language can be called a necessity.

Digital accessibility for everyone

Our mission is to make the digital landscape accessible to everyone. Are you looking for more information about how to do that? View our other blog posts, order our card game, or contact us directly.