The Challenges of Internet Users with Low or limited Vision

Once or twice while surfing the Net, you may have felt your eyesight become blurred or find it hard to focus on the screen. This is normally not a problem as you can always rest for a while to regain your perfect vision. But try to imagine yourself having limited vision all the time. What do you think are the challenges you may face as you browse web pages? How can they be solved?

The answers to these questions as well as additional related information are what we’ll focus on in this post. As you may know, we’re running a series about the challenges of Internet users with disabilities. This is the third installment in that series of posts.

Our friend Marvin will help us in identifying the common problems faced by low vision individuals. You may remember Marvin as that guy who shared with us A Day of a Low Vision Person. Let’s see what he’s been up to lately.

Colors in Web Pages

Marvin is currently working on his homework. He googles the topic he is researching on, but he finds only a few resources. Finally, he finds a site that contains lots of information and links to related resources. His sigh of relief is quickly replaced with that of frustration.

Why? It’s because of the color contrast of the site. The color of the text isn’t really far from the overall background color. For people with good vision, this may normally be quite a nuisance. But for low vision persons like Marvin, this can entirely prevent them from reading a site’s contents. This is because most low vision persons have difficulty in distinguishing things if their color contrast is not set apart from each other.

Marvin tries to look for other resources but he wasn’t able to find any. So he decides to contact the site’s web master and recommend another color contrast. Hoping that he’d get a response soon, Marvin settles for the site although it is hard to read.

What is the possible solution to this problem? If you were the web master of the site, you have a number of options.

First, you can provide a feature that lets visitors choose the color contrast they want. Somewhere at the top of your pages, you can have an option for making the font color dark and the background color light. Then you have another option to make the font color light and the background color dark.

Alternatively, you can simply adapt the standard color contrast that is accessible to all. This consists of black text on white background. With this color combination, you can be sure that everyone can comfortably read your content.

You can take the first option if you are very particular with the color contrast of your site. But if color contrast is not a big deal to you, you can choose to take the second option.

Size of Text in Pages

Marvin has set aside some cash and deposited it to his bank account. He goes online to check his total savings via the bank’s web site. But before he can even find this information...

“I know my savings are small, but does it mean the text in this site has to be small too?” Marvin jokingly says to himself as he sees the contents of the page.

The text of the site’s pages is noticeably smaller than the standard font size. In this case, persons with good vision can simply go a bit nearer to the screen. But this is obviously not an option for low vision persons who already read the screen at a short distance.

It’s a good thing that Marvin has his screen magnification software in his PC. But although he can use assistive technology, we all know that a site is accessible if it still can be used without this type of application.

The main solution to this problem is to use relative font sizes. If you use relative font sizes, people will be able to adjust the size of the page’s text in their browser. Optionally, you can have a feature that directly allows users to resize text. At the top of the page, you can have a set of options. Each option displays a specific font size. The user can choose between the normal font size, the larger size, and the largest one.

Through these accessibility techniques, low vision persons can read the text properly even without a screen magnifier.

Challenges Faced While Using Screen Readers

It has been a very long day of research and browsing. Marvin feels his eyes getting tired, but he still needs to finish some stuff, so he uses a screen reader to read web pages. A screen reader is a software that reads the text on the screen and the keys the user presses. Although low vision persons generally prefer to use their eyes, using screen readers is common during visually tiring situations.

While resting his eyes, Marvin makes the screen reader speak the text in the pages. And in this situation, he faces the same challenges faced by blind Internet users. This is because blind people mainly use screen readers to access and read web pages.

So things like images with no textual descriptions, audio or video that automatically plays, and too much content would also become challenges for Marvin. He can always use his eyes, but this defeats the purpose of resting them in the first place.

Conclusion

The main challenges faced by low vision persons deal with the visual aspects of web sites. The ones mentioned above, however, are just a few of these issues. We also found out that low vision individuals may also experience the same problems faced by blind Internet users.

So by making our site visually accessible and by solving the issues faced by blind users, we can ensure that low vision individuals would have a very comfortable browsing experience in our web sites.