Accessibility fundamentals - Auditory Disabilities

Deafness

While most of the web is accessible for users with auditory disabilities, as technology grows more and more audio, video, and multimedia content is making its way to the web. With this technology making its way onto websites as developers we need to make sure that theres way for users with auditory disabilities to still be able to navigate and understand the information out site has to offer.

We can make these technologies by providing transcripts of any audio the site has. This transcript will contain all the narration (including who is speaking), dialog, and any other sounds that are important sounds that need to be conveyed. For video files its necessary to provided synchronized captions so the user will be able to know where the transcript and the videos align.

Deafblind

There are also users who are both deaf and blind. These users only can interact with a computer by using both a refreshable braille display and a screen reader. The screen reader will read the webpages text and rather than reading out the info it will send it to the braille display, where the user is able to read via touch.