This morning I started off by firing up Chrome and skimming through DailyJS, CSS-Tricks, and Web Design Tuts+ to see if there were any new articles worth perusing. One caught my eye: Improving Web Typography for Visually Impaired Users.

Visually impaired users aren’t really discussed super often within the realm of web design (at least in the circles I run in). We are all aware of keeping conflicting colors and contrast within a reasonable level for those that are colorblind and most of us have a belief on best practices for font-sizing (*cough* 16px *cough*). But that is often where our consideration of user eye-sight ends. Should it?

Some Numbers

The article above clearly affirms that we need to take a more proactive role in addressing the issue and leads off with some interesting statistics, specifically:

Reports from late 2013 suggest there are an estimated 285 million visually impaired people globally. While 90% of these people live in developing nations, the remaining 10% includes 28,500,000 people who certainly interact with the web in some capacity.

28.5 million people, that’s a lot! Right? Not really…

According to the CIA, there are approximately 245 million internet users in the USA alone. So if we assume all 28.5 million visually impaired reside in the United States (an absurd assumption at best), they would only make up 11% of the total internet users (and that number gets much smaller if we take the estimated 2.4 billion reported internet users in the world).

Is 11% a lot?

Most places start dropping browser support around those percentages. So what about visually impaired users? Is this small segment worth the added effort to employ the strategies outlined in the above article?

This conversation has been going on a long time (check out this article from 2011). But, to answer these questions is to try and answer the much broader and more philosophical/ethical question of:

Is the content on your website something all people have the right to consume?

We could drag that conversation out forever, and since I don’t want to type up all my thoughts, as that would take forever, here are some questions to think about during the process:

Do major web companies (i.e., Facebook, Google, etc.) seem to be catering to these demographics?

If you alienate a certain segment of your user base based on their web browser, is it okay to do the same based on their handicap?

Will not providing these services to this group actually impact anything?

Is there a good return for the time/money put into developing for this demographic?

And so on.

Ultimately, this conversation about visually impaired users simply opens the door to a much bigger subject of demographics on the web as a whole and how our design decisions and coding practices can either enhance or diminish their browsing experience.