Today is World Keratoconus Day. What is that all about you ask?
It’s about raising awareness of Keratoconus. It’s not a common eye disease, but one that impacts people all around the world. I am one of those people.
What is Keratoconus?
Keratoconus is an eye disease in which the normally round dome-shaped cornea progressively thins causing a cone-like bulge to develop. It affects the eye's ability to focus resulting in short sightedness, blurred vision and ghosting. Keratoconus can also lead to an increased sensitivity to bright lights.
For me, my vision can be mostly corrected by wearing rigid gas permeable contact lenses. So yes, a lot of the time I can see fairly 'normally'. However, I can't wear my contact lenses all the time. Issues like eye infections, scratched corneas, hay fever and tiredness can often restrict my ability to wear them. Also, I rarely wear them in the evenings.
This means I often experience the world through impaired vision. I have lots of experience of using, and working with, the Web using screen magnification, browser zoom and increased font sizes. Sadly, many websites don’t take into account users with visual impairments.
Digital accessibility
To help people like me, and many others who have impaired sight or aging eyes, it’s important that you test your websites for the following:
- Websites should utilise responsive layouts: ensure you test these by changing the browser’s zoom level (things like popups and sticky components can often get in the way)
- Websites shouldn’t disable zoom: disabling this prevents people with impaired vision from making the content readable
- Websites should use relative units for font sizes: absolute units prevent text from scaling correctly to the user’s font size settings
- Websites should use good colour contrasts for text and interactive components
Keratoconus may be an uncommon eye disease, but over 2 million people in the UK live with sight loss. This is predicted to double by 2050! 1 in 5 will live with sight loss in their lifetime. Creating an accessible Web is really important.