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

for

From: John Dowdell
Date: Nov 14, 2005 8:20AM

Austin, Darrel wrote:
> 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?

For what it's worth, awhile ago I tried to research how small a
percentage of readers-of-English are native readers-of-English, but I
quickly got caught up in dueling statistics, depending on precisely when
an authority determined whether a reader "read English" or not.

It seems a certainty that that a majority of the people who might be
exposed to most sites written in English are not native readers (or
listeners) of that language, so skipping intros, minimizing
colloquialisms and cultural references, and writing clearly and
concisely can make a site more accessible to a larger number of people.

If your site has a purely local orientation then this may not matter.
Reading costs are a significant and under-emphasized issue, though.
Pictures and animation might be more accessible than text for these
audiences, even though they are useless to many with differences in
visual capability. It's a tough problem all around, made even tougher by
the fact that the stats on native English readers are so soft, so
contested by different methods of measurement.

jd




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