How People with Disabilities Use Digital Technology.
Dhruv, older adult student who is deaf.
Hello! My name is D-H-R-U-V, Dhruv. I’m Deaf.
I can hear some sounds but not enough to understand speech.
I sign British Sign Language. I think and dream in signs.
I recently enrolled in an online degree.
For my classes I schedule can interpreters who interpret
the lectures and conversations, and voice for me.
I need video conferencing apps with functionality to “pin” videos
of the interpreters so that I can always see them.
Some lectures have realtime captioning typed by human captioners.
This is more accurate than automatic captions, which often
don’t recognize specialized terms in the lectures.
For our assigned videos, I rely on good captions.
These are edited so that each sentence appearing on the screen
is not too long and is synchronized with the audio.
I also often find myself needing to adjust the text size and colors of
the captions, to be able to read them better. Some apps also allow
me to move the captions to the top or bottom of the video,
so that they are not in the way.
In some situations, I find myself lip reading.
For example, when I’m on unplanned calls without interpreters
or other people who can sign.
I learned lip reading over the years because of such
situations but it’s not always reliable for me.
I need to see the person’s mouth, have them speak clearly,
and seeing their gestures also helps. Yet it’s exhausting
and not really something I can keep doing for too long.
I also use the chat function.
Some chat tools support realtime text
rather than line-by-line text messages.
This is much more interactive, and I can engage with my friends in
text conversations as others do by voice.
Of course, the classes also come with a lot of reading.
I’m fine with that, except when the writing is unnecessarily
complex and without structure like lists and headings.
People don’t realize that for me reading text involves extra effort,
because sign language is my native language.
So, like for everyone else, clear and simple writing makes
text easier to understand.
You can help make technology accessible to me.
Accessibility: It’s about people.
For more information from the Web Accessibility Initiative on How
People with Disabilities Use Digital Technology,
visit w3.org/WAI/people