In this Insights post, eLaHub explores how eLaHub’s Access Needs Mapping activity helps practitioners challenge assumptions about disability and recognise diverse, overlapping and non-visible digital access needs.
In our Insights post, 20 eLearning accessibility tips for different access needs, we explored some of the issues we identified that prevented learning practitioners from engaging with accessibility and applying it successfully to learning content. One of the most common issues we identified in both our training and consultancy work was a narrow perception of who accessibility supports. Many practitioners associated digital accessibility almost entirely with blind people who use screen readers. Others believed that disabled people represented only a very small proportion of their learning audience. These misconceptions led us to develop an awareness-raising activity that has since become one of the foundations of how we talk about accessibility across eLaHub.
The eLaHub Access Needs Mapping activity helps practitioners connect accessibility requirements with real people, recognise the range of conditions and access needs within any learning audience, and get a better picture of why many of those needs may not be visible or disclosed.
Revisiting the four digital access needs
When we first created our accessibility awareness materials, we focused on the four broad categories of digital access need:
- Vision access needs
- Hearing access needs
- Motor access needs
- Cognitive access needs
These categories gave learning practitioners a straightforward way to begin thinking about and applying accessibility. They moved accessibility beyond just screen reader access and prompted practitioners to think about other considerations, such as captions, keyboard operation, content structure, navigation and plain language.
Turning the four categories into an activity
As we started using the four access needs with learning teams, we quickly saw how useful they were for opening up much broader conversations about accessibility. That led us to develop them into an interactive awareness-raising activity that we called our eLaHub Access Needs Mapping activity.
In our training sessions and consultancy kick-off meetings, we asked the teams we were supporting to think of someone with a disability, condition or access need.
We explained that this person could be anyone, for example:
- The participant themselves
- Someone in their family
- A friend or colleague
- A public figure they know about
We then asked them to identify the person’s condition or access need and consider which of the four categories it might fit into.
We found that this simple exercise was really useful in helping to move accessibility beyond technical requirements to something that impacted real people. Instead of opening with success criteria, conformance levels and specialist terminology, the conversation began with someone participants knew or recognised.
Accessibility then became connected to a parent with arthritis, a colleague with hearing loss, a friend with dyslexia or a family member who had developed cataracts. It sometimes also connected with a participant’s own disability or health condition, including one they had chosen not to share with their team or workplace. And even when someone could not immediately think of a person they knew directly, the option of a well-known public figure gave them a real person and experience they could recognise. As a result, participants began to recognise that access needs were already present within their families, workplaces and wider communities.
Useful categories with important limitations
As we worked on developing this activity further, we also learned a useful lesson about the categories themselves. Although the four categories were useful, they could also be too rigid and oversimplified. Participants often described conditions that could affect more than one area. They also recognised that two people with the same condition might experience very different barriers.
Multiple sclerosis, for example, could affect vision, movement, dexterity, fatigue, memory or concentration. Cerebral palsy could involve motor and speech access needs, with the impact varying considerably from one person to another. These discussions showed us that we needed to address the limitations of the categories before asking participants to complete the activity. We therefore looked for evidence and guidance that would help us explain this clearly.
W3C guidance on diverse abilities and barriers recognises that people may experience multiple disabilities and that health conditions can affect stamina, dexterity and concentration. It also highlights temporary access needs, changing abilities and conditions that affect people differently at different times. Most importantly, it recommends considering people’s functional needs rather than relying on medical classifications.
“It is important to consider the broad diversity of functional needs rather than categorize people according to medical classifications.”
What we took from our research was that the categories were a useful starting point, but only that. They could help practitioners think more broadly about access needs, but they do not define a person or tell us what support they will need.
Knowing someone’s condition does not tell us how they will experience a piece of learning. We still need to look at the barriers created by the content, technology, environment or activity, and the design decisions and adjustments that can remove those barriers.
The range of conditions people identified
The next step in our Access Needs Mapping activity was to ask participants to try and think of one condition that would fit into the categories that they had not already considered. Over time, participants generated a substantial collection of conditions and digital access needs.
Some of the most commonly discussed included:
Vision access needs
- Blindness
- Low vision
- Colour vision deficiency, often called colour blindness
- Glaucoma
- Cataracts
Hearing access needs
- Deafness
- Hearing loss
- Acoustic trauma
- Auditory processing differences
- Tinnitus
Motor access needs
- Limb differences
- Arthritis
- Multiple sclerosis
- Repetitive strain injury
- Cerebral palsy
- Parkinson’s
- Tremors
Cognitive access needs
- Neurodivergent conditions such as autism, dyslexia and ADHD
- Epilepsy
- Vestibular disorders
- Mental health conditions, including depression
Broadening the picture of disability
Again, we identified many benefits of this next stage of the activity. The conditions people contributed helped broaden practitioners’ perceptions of disability. They ranged from blindness and deafness to arthritis, tinnitus, dyslexia and depression.
Motor access needs, for example, often produced one of the most significant shifts in understanding. When people first considered the word ‘motor’, they often thought of someone who uses a wheelchair. Yet within the digital context, most motor barriers relate more directly to hands, arms, coordination, pain, fatigue and manual dexterity.
A person may walk without difficulty but find it painful to use a mouse. Someone with a tremor may struggle to activate a small control accurately. Repetitive strain injury may make repeated clicking difficult even though there is no visible sign of disability. Once practitioners understood this, concepts such as keyboard access, target size, visible focus and alternatives to drag-and-drop interactions were much easier to convey.
For a broader introduction to how these and other accessibility considerations apply across websites, systems and digital content, explore our eLaHub ultimate guide to digital accessibility in the workplace.
Challenging ‘us and them’ thinking
Another positive impact of asking practitioners to identify conditions was that it demonstrated that access needs are not always fixed from birth or experienced consistently every day. Some conditions develop later in life. For example, glaucoma may affect someone’s vision as they age, while arthritis may gradually change how comfortably they can use a keyboard or mouse.
Other needs can be intermittent or recurring. Pain, fatigue, medication and changes in health can affect how someone interacts with digital content on a particular day. Digital access needs can also be temporary. A broken wrist may temporarily change how someone operates a computer, while an ear infection may affect access to audio content.
This helped move the conversation away from the idea of a fixed group of ‘disabled learners’ who are separate from everyone else. Any of us can experience a permanent, temporary, intermittent or situational access need. This means that the support we require may change during our lives or even from one day to the next.
A much wider audience than practitioners expected
We found that the range of conditions identified through the exercise also helped practitioners recognise why disability and access needs affected a far larger proportion of their audience than they may have expected.
Recent research on the prevalence of disability in the workplace from Boston Consulting Group surveyed nearly 28,000 employees across 16 countries. Most organisations reported that between 4% and 7% of their employees were disabled. However, when employees were given the opportunity to self-identify, around 25% said they had a disability or health condition that limited a major life activity. Although this does not mean that disabled people will always make up 25% of every learning audience, it does demonstrate the scale of the gap between organisational perceptions and employees’ experiences.
If people mainly think of disability as blindness or a visible physical disability, a figure of around 25% can seem surprisingly high. But once we used the activity to explore the much wider range of sensory, physical, cognitive, neurological and mental health conditions that may be present in any workforce, the figure started to make much more sense.
Recognising this wider range helped practitioners understand the gap between organisational perceptions and employees’ own experiences. It also challenged one of the statements we have heard repeatedly during client conversations:
“We don’t have any disabled people in our audience.”
An organisation may not know who has a disability or access need. That is very different from those people not being in the learning audience.
The access needs organisations may never know about
The activity also helped explain why organisations may be unaware of many of the disabilities and access needs within their learning audience. Once participants started identifying conditions such as hearing loss, autism, dyslexia, mental health conditions, chronic pain and fatigue, it became much easier to recognise how many of these experiences may not be outwardly visible to other people.
There is evidence to support this. A UK Parliament research briefing on non-visible disabilities cites estimates that 70% to 80% of disabilities are non-visible and includes mental health conditions, neurodivergence, hearing, vision and speech conditions, and energy-limiting conditions among its examples. The Hidden Disabilities Sunflower charity reports a similar figure, stating that up to 80% of disabled people have a non-visible disability.
This reinforced another important point from the activity. Many disabilities and access needs are not outwardly visible, so organisations cannot rely on disclosure data or requests for adjustments to know who may need accessible learning. People with disabilities and access needs will already be part of the learning audience, even when an organisation is not aware of them.
Progress over perfection – overlooking speech access needs
After running the activity for several months, we learned another important lesson. We realised that our categories had overlooked an important access need. In one of our sessions, a practitioner questioned why we hadn’t included speech access needs. Speech had been much less prominent in our thinking because many of the barriers arise in live, virtual and face-to-face participation rather than self-paced digital learning. But it was still an important access need for us to have overlooked.
Once we added speech access needs, participants identified conditions including:
- Stammering
- Dysarthria
- Apraxia of speech
- Aphasia
- Mutism
- Tourette syndrome
Adding speech access needs made the activity more inclusive and also broadened the discussion beyond self-paced learning content. One participant shared how his stammer had made him dread contributing in meetings or being asked to give presentations. This helped practitioners recognise that accessibility should shape participation across the whole organisation, not only access to learning content.
Why the activity continues to have such an impact
The eLaHub Access Needs Mapping activity has become one of the most useful tools in our accessibility awareness work. We have also turned it into a key lesson in our award-winning Designing Accessible Learning Content (DALC) Programme.
It works because it helps teams:
- Connect accessibility with people they know
- Move beyond a primary focus on blindness
- Recognise the breadth of conditions within an audience
- Understand that digital access needs can overlap and change
- Recognise why many disabilities may not be visible or disclosed
- Identify speech as an essential consideration beyond self-paced digital content
It also creates valuable conversations within teams. Participants often hear colleagues describe conditions or experiences they had never previously considered. Some choose to share their own digital access needs. Others begin recognising barriers experienced by people in their families or workplaces. This develops a much more meaningful foundation for the work that follows.
When we later introduce captions, keyboard access, alternative text, contrast or plain language, those requirements are no longer abstract. Participants can connect the design decision with people they know, experiences they have discussed and barriers they can now recognise. That is why our Access Needs Mapping activity remains such an effective starting point for our work. It gives practitioners a human context for the standards and helps accessibility become something they can apply to the learning decisions they make every day.
About this article
Written by: Susi Miller and the eLaHub team
Published: July 2026
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Links and resources
- 20 eLearning accessibility tips for different access needs – eLaHub Insights post
- Diverse Abilities and Barriers – W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
- eLaHub ultimate guide to digital accessibility in the workplace
- Your Workforce Includes People with Disabilities. Does Your People Strategy? – Boston Consulting Group
- Invisible Disabilities in Education and Employment – UK Parliament POST
- What is a hidden disability? – Hidden Disabilities Sunflower
- Designing Accessible Learning Content Programme – eLaHub
