Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Day

Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Day (SCIAD) is an annual UK campaign led by the Spinal Injuries Association, held on the third Friday of May. It raises awareness of spinal cord injury, the lives of people living with SCI, and the support and rehabilitation people need after a spinal cord injury.

Spinal cord injury can affect movement and sensation in the arms and hands as well as the legs, which shapes how some people use the web. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s user story for Ade, a reporter with limited use of his arms, describes adaptive strategies including a joystick operated with the palm of the hand, a keyboard with larger keys that are easier to hit accurately and which he operates with one finger, and speech recognition software for dictation and voice commands. Each method has trade-offs: a palm-operated joystick can be inaccurate on small targets such as placing a cursor between words, extended keyboard or joystick use is tiring, and speech recognition only works reliably when links and controls are clearly labelled and coded correctly.

Websites that work well for people with similar access needs provide a clearly visible keyboard focus indicator, a tab order that matches the visual order of the page, popups and dialogs that can be closed with the keyboard, including by pressing the Escape key, and long forms that can be paused or extended rather than timing out. Skip links that move focus past repeated navigation are also significant. Ade’s story notes he avoids sites that lack them.