Deafblind Awareness Week

An annual campaign by the Helen Keller National Center, recognising the achievements and potential of people who are deafblind. Held the last week of June, around Helen Keller’s birthday on 27 June. The 2026 theme is ‘Connected by Touch: Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges’.

Deafblind people use the web in many different ways depending on how much residual sight or hearing they have. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s user story for Marta, a marketing assistant who is deaf and blind, describes one combination of strategies: screen magnification of up to 20 times, captions and transcripts for video, and a refreshable braille display for reading, writing, and navigating apps. Each method depends on content being coded properly. Magnification breaks down when text doesn’t reflow and she has to scroll horizontally, tables don’t survive zoom, and her braille display can’t read forms whose buttons aren’t coded correctly.

Websites that work well for people with similar access needs reflow text cleanly at high zoom levels, use proper HTML so refreshable braille displays and screen readers can interpret structure, label form controls and buttons accurately, provide captions and transcripts for all video and audio, and avoid CAPTCHAs that rely on seeing or hearing distorted content.