Helen Keller Day

Helen Keller Day commemorates the birth of Helen Keller (27 June 1880), the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree and a lifelong disability rights and women’s rights activist. It was first recognised by US presidential proclamation in 1980, and is observed annually on her birthday. The day overlaps with Deafblind Awareness Week.

Deafblind people today use a wide range of tools to access the web, including screen readers, screen magnification, captions, transcripts, and refreshable braille displays. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s user story for Marta, a marketing assistant who is deaf and blind, describes a profoundly deaf woman with progressive vision loss who magnifies her screen, relies on captions and transcripts for video, and is learning to use a refreshable braille display for email, web browsing, and notes as she takes fashion design classes at her local college. Her story is one example. Other deafblind people combine these tools differently, including tactile signing and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART).

Websites that work well for people with similar access needs use semantic HTML so braille displays and screen readers can interpret headings, labels, and tables correctly, reflow text at high magnification without breaking layout, provide captions and transcripts for all video and audio, ensure forms can be completed with the keyboard, and avoid CAPTCHAs that rely on seeing or hearing distorted content.