Supporting people with mobility and coordination difficulties

Mobility difficulties is a broad category that includes people with manual impairments, wheelchair users, hemiparesis or spinal injury. Motor impairments can contribute to communication difficulties or learning disabilities. Temporary disabilities (accident or injury) may also cause impairment to a range of physical activities and affect a student's ability to study.

Potential issues

The inherent nature of the mobility or coordination difficulty may have a bearing on: 

  • Existing risk assessments. 
  • Full participation in any tasks requiring physical activity, such as field trips or lab work. 
  • Access to physical teaching and learning environments, on and off campus. 
  • The ability to sit still for long periods of time, i.e. lectures and seminars. 
  • Use of keyboard or mouse, or ability to handwrite. 

Key adjustments

Designing for users with physical or motor disabilities 

Do 

  • make large clickable actions 
  • give form fields space 
  • design for keyboard or speech only use 
  • design with mobile and touch screen in mind 
  • provide shortcuts 

Don't 

  • demand precision
  • bunch interactions together
  • make dynamic content that requires a lot of mouse movement
  • have short time out windows 
  • tire users with lots of typing and scrolling 

The above Do’s and Dont's contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. 

Extra Resource:

Please take a look a this government resource: Designing for physical or motor disabilities.

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