A day in someone else's shoes
Order vitamins, pick a delivery time, renew a prescription. Easy, until the website gets in the way. Try everyday tasks with blurred sight, different colour vision, a screen reader or shaky hands. Then fix the website and try again.
5 things anyone building a website can do
These come from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard. None of them are hard. Most are free if you do them from the start.
- Describe your images
Give every meaningful image a short text alternative (alt text), and never put important words inside a picture.
- Make text easy to read
Keep a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 between normal text and its background, and let people zoom without breaking the page.
- Label every button and field
A button should say what it does, out loud too. "Renew prescription" beats an icon, and "click here" helps nobody.
- Let people use a keyboard
Everything you can do with a mouse should work with a keyboard or a switch, with a visible focus and no tight time limits.
- Never rely on colour alone
Add words, icons or patterns to colour: "Full" and "Available", not just red and green. And make tap targets big.
In the UAE: people of determination
In April 2017 the UAE Cabinet announced that people with disabilities would be called "people of determination" (أصحاب الهمم). The name puts the focus on ability, not limits.
The UAE's National Digital Accessibility Policy (2024), led by the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA), covers websites, apps and digital services. It applies to federal government entities and to the companies and contractors that deliver digital services, with a focus on people of determination and senior citizens.
Dubai's Community Development Authority issues the Sanad card to people of determination. It works as an ID and gives access to services, facilities and benefits from government and private organisations.
The WHO describes disability as the result of a health condition meeting barriers around it, like inaccessible buildings, attitudes and, yes, websites. Remove the barrier and the person can do the task.
A few minutes with a filter can't show what living with a disability is like. People who are blind, have low vision, colour blindness or a tremor do these tasks every day with real skill, using tools they know well. What slowed you down here was not the condition. It was the website.
Sources: World Health Organization disability fact sheet (over 1.3 billion people, about 16% of the world, live with disability); WebAIM Million 2026 report (95.9% of the top 1,000,000 home pages had automatically detected WCAG 2 failures, 56.1 errors per page on average; low-contrast text on 83.9%); W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2; UK NHS guidance via nidirect (colour vision deficiency affects about 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women); UAE Cabinet (April 2017, "people of determination"); UAE Legislation portal and u.ae (National Digital Accessibility Policy); Khaleej Times on Dubai's Sanad card. "Nakhla Pharmacy" is made up. The simulations are simplified illustrations: real conditions vary a lot from person to person.