Title: Disabilities in other countries
Time: 30 minutes
Purpose:
To explore how common different disabilities are in other parts of the world, especially in places where your digital product is used. This helps build awareness of the types of challenges people may face when using websites or apps, and why accessibility matters everywhere.
Activity:
- Choose a country or region to research. Ideally, pick somewhere your app, website, or users are based.
- Look up how common different disabilities are in that area—especially ones that might affect someone’s experience online, such as:
- Sight loss or vision impairment
- Hearing loss
- Reading difficulties like dyslexia
- Colour blindness
- Motor or cognitive impairments
- Make a note of anything interesting, surprising, or new that you learn.
- Write a short summary (a few sentences are fine) of what you found and submit it below.
Need a starting point?
Here are some example figures:
US stats:
- The number of people living in the USA is approximately 327 million people.
- About 10% of these have a reading disability inc. dyslexia. That’s 32 million people
- Around 8% of caucasian males in the US suffer from some form of color blindness, compared to 0.5% of females. That’s 8.5% of the people suffering from colour blindness in America, which is 27 million).
USA, Canada, UK stats:
- Canada has a population of 37 million, US 327 million and UK has 66 million.
- 4-5% of people in the US, UK and Canada suffer from difficulty hearing.
- When it comes to vision, 3-4% of people in the US, UK and Canada can’t see well enough to read.