188体育

I鈥檓 training my software to understand my voice commands. In the meantime, I鈥檒l carry on using a keyboard to get around websites as it鈥檚 less painful than a mouse.

Christopher is 53 and lives with his wife Helen in Manchester. They鈥檝e just become grandparents for the first time.

Christopher works as management accountant for a local food manufacturing company. He鈥檚 been working there for 22 years.

He developed rheumatoid arthritis 10 years ago. His company assesses his workspace every year and make sure he has what he needs.

Devices and technology

Christopher uses a desktop computer at work and a keyboard with a wrist rest. He has programmed some shortcuts into his keyboard, and prefers those to his trackball mouse (which is painful to use after a while).

He has just tried out Dragon NaturallySpeaking (speech recognition software). He thinks it may work well for him, and he鈥檚 going to invest more time in 鈥榯raining鈥� it to understand his voice.

He has a basic mobile phone for calls. He thinks there鈥檚 no point in him getting a smartphone that he can鈥檛 use.

Goals and wishes

Christopher wants more software to work properly with just the keyboard. He鈥檚 been trying to find some a way to make a calendar with baby pictures, but all the sites he鈥檚 tried only work with a mouse.

When he鈥檚 fully proficient in Dragon NaturallySpeaking, he wants to be able to use any website at all.

Frustrations

It鈥檚 annoying for Christopher when he can鈥檛 use certain parts of a website with a keyboard, like video players and navigation menus.

It takes him a while to fill out forms, and he hates it when they time out without much warning.

He wastes a lot of time trying to tab through things like navigation menus. He鈥檇 love to have fewer things to tab through in general.

He sometimes has problems with pop-up boxes. This happens most when a pop-up appears but the tab control stays on the background page, meaning he can鈥檛 interact with the pop-up or close it.

Making things better for Christopher

What to do	Further reading
Make sure all parts of your service or website work for people who use a keyboard instead of a mouse or trackpad.	, on the GDS Accessibility blog. , by Nielsen Norman Group.
Test your service to make sure you avoid specific issues for keyboard users, like focus order and keyboard traps.	, guidance by WebAIM. , guidance by 18F.
Don鈥檛 have time limits on forms. Let people save what they鈥檙e doing or extend the time limit.	, guidance by the University of Washington.
Test that your service works with speech recognition software.	, guidance from the BBC Accessibility team.
Include features that make it easy for users to complete forms - for example, have an 鈥榓ddress lookup鈥� so users only need to enter their postcode and house number.	, a pattern in the 188体育 Design System.

More reading

You may find the following resources useful:

• 鈥楧esigning for users with physical or motor disabilities鈥� is one of a set of posters designed by the Home Office. You can
• , blog post by Simple Primate
• , article by WebAIM
• , blog post written by a user of speech recognition software

Statistics about disability

Almost 1 in 5 people (around 19% of the population) in the UK have a disability. The likelihood of having a disability increases the older you get.

Nearly 700,000 people in the UK have rheumatoid arthritis.

There are nearly 7 million people with disabilities who are of working age - nearly 19% of the working population.