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Re: Web site(s) that list general disability statistics?

for

From: Katharine Whitelaw
Date: Nov 10, 2005 3:00PM

I have the same problem here at Northern Illinois University, where we
officially have 10 blind students in a population of 25,000. HOWEVER,
we don't know who might be looking at our site who isn't yet a student
but a potential one, or an alumni who is now blind or visually impaired.
So it's often not possible to say "we know exactly who is in our
audience so we don't have to care about that disability."

AND THEN - many of our site visitors are using small devices so they
have many of the same needs as visually impaired: no mouse, a difficult
keyboard, no images or images turned off, no color or hard-to-see color
because they're outside, and a linear view of the pages similar to using
a screen reader.

Katy Whitelaw
ITS Helpdesk
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL

>>> <EMAIL REMOVED> 11/10/05 3:07 PM >>>
Often when I talk of accessibility, I get hit with the usuall
rebuttals
'well, blind people are such a minority' or 'yea, I know being color
blind is a problem but that's so few people', etc.

I do try to convicne them that accessibility isn't about specific
minorities, but rather about makings sites more usable for everyone,
but
thought it would be ncie to have some numbers regarding some of those
types of questions. Is anyone aware of some resources that go over
things like 'number of people with vision impairments' or 'number of
people that use non-mouse screen navigation' etc?

Googling turns up surprisingly little in the way of hard demographic
data. Or maybe I haven't been using the right searches...

-Darrel