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How People with Disabilities Use Digital Technology.

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Dhruv, older adult student who is deaf.

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Hello! My name is D-H-R-U-V, Dhruv. I’m Deaf.

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I can hear some sounds but not enough to understand speech.

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I sign British Sign Language. I think and dream in signs.

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I recently enrolled in an online degree.

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For my classes I schedule can interpreters who interpret 

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the lectures and conversations, and voice for me.

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I need video conferencing apps with functionality to “pin” videos

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of the interpreters so that I can always see them.

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Some lectures have realtime captioning typed by human captioners.

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This is more accurate than automatic captions, which often

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don’t recognize specialized terms in the lectures.

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For our assigned videos, I rely on good captions.

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These are edited so that each sentence appearing on the screen

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is not too long and is synchronized with the audio.

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I also often find myself needing to adjust the text size and colors of

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the captions, to be able to read them better. Some apps also allow

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me to move the captions to the top or bottom of the video,

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so that they are not in the way.

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In some situations, I find myself lip reading.

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For example, when I’m on unplanned calls without interpreters

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or other people who can sign.

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I learned lip reading over the years because of such 

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situations but it’s not always reliable for me.

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I need to see the person’s mouth, have them speak clearly,

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and seeing their gestures also helps. Yet it’s exhausting

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and not really something I can keep doing for too long.

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I also use the chat function.

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Some chat tools support realtime text

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rather than line-by-line text messages.

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This is much more interactive, and I can engage with my friends in

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 text conversations as others do by voice.

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Of course, the classes also come with a lot of reading.

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I’m fine with that, except when the writing is unnecessarily

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complex and without structure like lists and headings.

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People don’t realize that for me reading text involves extra effort,

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because sign language is my native language.

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So, like for everyone else, clear and simple writing makes

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text easier to understand.

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You can help make technology accessible to me.

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Accessibility: It’s about people.

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For more information from the Web Accessibility Initiative on How

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People with Disabilities Use Digital Technology,

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visit w3.org/WAI/people