Disability Status question suggestions

[SachaG]

@LeaVerou suggested to:

• Add vestibular disorders
• Split up visual impairments into low vision and atypical color vision

[SachaG]

My objections:

• Vestibular disorders have not been mentioned by survey respondents
• If we split up an item now it will make it harder to do historical comparisons with previous years.
• The goal of the question is more to get a vague general sense of what percentage of respondents live with disabilities, and not to precisely identify the ratios of each disabilities.

[LeaVerou]

What I proposed was to harmonize the disabilities question with the question about "What kind of user disabilities do you account for when making websites?"

Not only for consistency, but also:

• People with vestibular disorders (i.e. the kind prefers-reduced-motion was designed for) currently have to resort to "Other…". So yes, you won't get people mentioning it, because we've generally observed people don't use "Other…" even when it's relevant, and this is an even smaller population.
• I suggested we split visual impairments into low vision and atypical color vision. Atypical color vision affects 4% of the population (8% in men, who according to past demographics are 60-70% of respondents, so more like 5.5%). Blindness affects 0.5%. If we lump them together, the former essentially erases the latter. Sure, there are similar disparities in other categories, but they don't affect web usage in the same way (e.g. arthritis is generally less severe than paralysis from the waist down, yet it affects web usage more).
• I also suggested we split learning disabilities from cognitive disabilities, that was primarily for consistency, and to allow us to list more examples in either category (e.g. many people wouldn't guess that anxiety or ADHD are part of cognitive disabilities unless they see it listed).

to get a vague general sense of what percentage of respondents live with disabilities, and not to precisely identify the ratios of each disabilities.

If that's the goal, we can just ask them if they have any disabilities and leave it at that, like this question on e.g. greenhouse:

If we break it into categories, we should do it in a way that is intuitive and does not exclude people and minimize the percentage of disabled folk even more. There's enough erasure as it stands.

[LeaVerou]

Some data points about whether participants feel their disabilities are actually covered by the survey options:

State of JS 2022

"Not listed" by far the most popular disability with 1.7 times the responses of all others combined.

State of CSS 2022

"Not listed" by far the most popular disability with 1.3 times the responses of all others combined.

State of CSS 2023 appears to be buggy wrt "Not Listed" or did not have this option:

[SachaG]

Btw CSS 2023 did not actually have a "not listed" option, since it had the "other…" option instead.

[svgeesus]

Split up visual impairments into low vision and atypical color vision

Strongly agree: people who are blind or have low vision will be affected way more and require different accommodations to someone with atypical color vision (which varies from the very common reduced ability to differentiate these two colors to the extremely rare can't see color at all)