Categories and Characteristics of Disabilities Flashcards
What are common visual disabilities?
- Blindness
- Color vision deficiency
- Low vision
What is blindness?
Some, nearly complete, or complete vision loss. Some people are completely blind and can’t see anything, others can see general shapes but can’t recognize people or read text.
Demographics:
- 2.2 billion worldwide have vision impairment (1 billion could have been prevented or yet to be addressed)
- leading causes: uncorrected refractive errors or cataracts
- most are 50+ y/o
What is color vision deficiency?
Person can’t distinguish certain color combinations. Most common is red-green color blindness.
Demographics
- Red/green - 1 in 12 males in US (8%), 1 in 200 females (0.5%)
- Blue/yellow - affects male/female equally, 1 in 10,000 people globally
What is low vision?
Uncorrectable vision loss interfering with daily activities; not enough vision to do what you need to do. Defined by eye professionals as permanently reduced vision that can’t be fixed with glasses, contacts, medicine, surgery
Person needs magnification to read details. Some experience low contrast or have color deficiencies.
Demographics:
- 246 million (3.5%) of world
- 90% live in low-income settings
What are barriers for people with visual disabilities?
- Materials not available in digital files, braille, alt. formats
- People who don’t describe navigation steps/visual info
- Inadequate lighting
- Sounds masking informative sounds like directional cues
- Non-tactile signs
- Objects in travel paths that become obstacles
- In websites: images, controls, other meaningful elements that don’t have text alternatives
- Texts/images/page layouts that can’t be resized/lose info when resized
- Missing visual & non-visual orientation cues, page structure, other nav. aids
- Video content without text/audio alternatives or audio description
- Inconsistent, unpredictable, overly complicated nav. mechanisms & page functions
- Text & images w/ insufficient color contrast
- Sites/browsers that don’t let you set up custom color combos
- Sites/browsers that don’t work fully using keyboard
What are solutions for people with visual disabilities in the physical environment?
- Raised tiles on ground to indicate edge of a platform, pathway along sidewalk, beginning of a staircase
- Eliminate low-hanging architectural features
- Clear obstructions in hallways & on sidewalks
- Info in braille on signs & controls (e.g. elevator buttons, code locks)
- Tactile controls on flat devices like microwaves and dishwashers
What are solutions for people with visual disabilities in ICT?
- Provide text alternatives for non-text info
- Make sure graphics allow for magnification
- Use color combos with high contrast
- Don’t rely on color alone to convey meaning or info
- Standard, consistent positioning & visual presentation of objects
What are assistive technologies for people with visual disabilities?
- Screen readers convert text & structural info of interfaces & content to speech
- Audio descriptions
- Screen magnification
- Large print
- GPS-based nav. instructions w/ audio interface (automated or remote human navigator)
- Mobile apps that provide audio descriptions of photos of objects/people
- Mobile apps that scan barcodes and provide audio product info
- Software to customize color contrast, color filter, color themes
- Canes to help feel surroundings
- Service animals
- Electronic mobility aids (echolocation to notify obstacles in front)
- Refreshable braille devices
- OCR (optical character recognition) - scans printed doc and converts to digital text
- Video magnifiers and CCTVs
What are common auditory disabilities?
- Deafness
- Hard of hearing
- APD (Central Auditory Processing Disorder)
What is deafness?
- Total/near total loss of hearing
- Has difficulty with sounds, incl. audio part of media
- First language of people born deaf is usually sign language. May be uncomfy with reading text b/c it’s 2nd language
- People who lose hearing later in life may never learn sign language
What is hard of hearing?
- Mild to severe hearing loss but have some useful hearing still
- May communicate thru sign language/spoken language w/ or w/o amplification
- Most HOH people can use phone or hearing aids
- Demographics: 430 million have disabling hearing loss, 750k in EU use sign language as 1st language
What is Central Auditory Processing Disorder (APD)?
- Greater than expected difficulty hearing & understanding speech even though there’s no hearing loss
- Can be confused with ADHD, language impairment, learning disabilities, social & emotional delays, cognitive deficits
- Inability to interpret, organize, analyze what’s heard
- Difficulty locating source of sound, understanding what was said in loud places, following spoken directions, learning songs & instruments, paying attention, responding promptly, learning new language
- Demographics: 5% of global population
What are barriers for people with auditory disabilities?
- People who speak softly or in large spaces w/o mics
- Absence of sign language interpretation
- Loud environments/competing sounds like background noise
- Convos, interactions, meetings where accessing communication from mult. speakers is difficult
- Poor lighting making it hard to lip read
- Websites/tech that require voice interaction or listening to engage with content
- Audio in videos & films presented w/o captions/transcripts
- Media players that don’t support captions or don’t contain options to control volume or customize size/color of captions
What are solutions for people with auditory disabilities?
- Sign language interpretation
- CART or STTR accurate and usable captions for videos, live online meetings, live presentations
- Text alternatives like transcripts
- For doorbells, alarms, alerts: provide alt. visual alerts like flashing lights
- Quiet work environment or option to work in diff settings
- Clear signs for meeting rooms w/ mics connected to audio induction loops
- Spaces with good acoustics/lighting
What are assistive technologies for people with auditory disabilities?
- Assistive listening systems & devices in meeting rooms & auditoriums
- Personal listening devices (PLD) to connect with assistive listening systems
- Hearing aids
- Cochlear implants
- Audio controls
- Haptic alerts/feedback
- Visual labels/notifications/alerts
- Text to speech software
- Sound field systems to amplify speaker voices
- Noise canceling headphones
What is deaf-blindness?
- Uses touch as primary means of communication
- Includes both deafness + blindness; most retain some hearing & sight
- Learns braille to access text and sign language and feels signing hands of other person in convos
- Demographics: 0.2-2% of population
What are barriers for people with deafblindness?
- Lack of printed braille in books, menus, navigation aids
- Incorrect/incomplete output to braille keyboard in websites/other tech
- Lack of braille transcripts of video or audio
- Lack of tactile sign language interpretation
What are solutions for people with deafblindness?
- Transcripts of video/audio materials in braille
- Tactile sign language interpretation
- Other solutions based on individual needs
What are assistive technologies for people with deafblindness?
- Screen readers converting text to braille on refreshable braille devices
- For audio/video: conversion of transcripts to braille
- Printed braille
- Haptic alerts/feedback
- Cane
- Service animals
- Tactile navigation aids
- Tactile sign language interpretation
- Deaf-blind communicator
What are common speech and language disabilities?
- Speech sound disorders
- Organic speech sound disorders
- Functional speech sound disorders
- No speech
- Aphasia
What is the difference between speech vs language disabilities?
- Language disorders: may affect not only speech but ability to write, read, understand info
- Speech disorders: only affects the way people say words and make sounds
What is speech sound disorders?
- Mild slurred speech to complete inability to move mouth to speak
- Ability to speak may be completely unrelated to person’s language capabilities
- May be caused by side effect of underlying disabilities
- Could improve, remain stable, or worsen
What is organic speech sound disorders?
- Result from motor/neurological disorders:
- Apraxia: person knows what they want to say but brain has difficulty planning speaking movements
- Dysarthria: difficulty controlling muscles used to speak
- Structural deficiencies: e.g. cleft lip palate
- Sensory/perceptual disorders: e.g. hearing loss
- Characteristics: slow, slurred speech, making inconsistent speech errors, distorting sounds, errors in tone, stress, rhythm
What is functional speech sound disorders?
- Doesn’t stem from acquired or developmental disorders, have no known cause
- Characteristics: errors in articulation (clear & distinct sounds) & phonology
- Demographics: higher in kids (5-25% depending on age group) than adults
What is no speech?
- Mutism, inability to speak
- Caused by damage to brain and/or speech muscles, emotional/psychological reasons, or combination of causes
- Neurogenic mutism is caused by brain injury, often from other organic speech/language disorders (e.g. aphasia, apraxia, dysarthria)
- Psychogenic mutism has psychological causes, 3 types:
- elective mutism: chooses not to speak
- selective mutism: wants to speak but can’t in some situations b/c of anxiety
- total mutism: doesn’t speak at all
- Demographics: selective mutism in 0.47-0.76% of population
What is aphasia?
- Language disorder from neurological damage
- Affects all of language, not just speech
- Always due to injury to brain (most commonly from stroke, esp in older people but can also happen from head trauma, brain tumors, infections)
- Multiple types of aphasia: may not recognize words, understand what’s being said, be unable to speak or say what they mean, difficulty forming sentences & omitting words
- Demographics: 2 million+ in USA, 250k in Britain
What are barriers for people with language and speech disorders?
- Complex communication systems
- Not enough time to communicate, access info, or respond
- Lack of understanding & patience by persons when communicating (e.g. in service contexts)
- Lack of alternatives for speech communication (e.g. multimodal or text-based alternatives)
What are solutions for people with language and speech disabilities?
- Simplified communication methods, multiple options for communication
- More understanding, patience, and adaptations by people when communicating
- Additional time to complete tasks
- Providing option to use text-based alternatives to speech to communicate