By Sarah Horton and David Sloan — Some people have disabilities that affect the ability to move and control movement, in particular the use of the hands to operate a computer, smartphone, tablet, kiosk, or other hardware device. Within this category of disability, there are a range of diverse conditions that cause:
- Changes to fine motor control, leading to tremors, unpredictable movement, or difficulty moving hands and fingers, making it difficult to use a standard mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen, or to operate buttons on a hardware device.
- Reduced sensitivity in fingers, making it more difficult to operate devices, including touchscreens.
- Increased pain when attempting to make physical movements.
- Reduced energy levels when attempting to make physical movements.
- Paralysis and loss of use of one or more limbs.
- Loss of limb.
Some physical disabilities are sufficiently severe that people are unable to use their limbs (hands and/or feet) to control their device and instead use other parts of their body to control input methods, such as speech or eye‑gaze.
User accessibility needs related to physical/motor disabilities include the ability to:
- Adjust timeouts to ensure there is enough time to complete actions.
- Efficiently interact with a digital product using a keyboard or keyboard‑substitute input device.
- Adjust the operation of a keyboard, to reduce the effort required to accurately press a key.
- Visually track the progress of keyboard focus through an interface.
- Efficiently interact with a digital product using speech input.
- Make it easy to accurately hover or click a mouse or other pointing device.
- Make it easy to interact with a touchscreen interface without requiring complex gestures.
From Horton, S., & Sloan, D. (2024). What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.
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