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Comment by greenshackle | Hacker News Reader

"it was found that there are more hard of hearing users in the United States than the population Spain and more users who are blind and low-vision than the population of Canada."

Really? There's more than 35 millions internet users with vision impairment? The previous section says there are 8 million people with vision impairment in the USA.

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If they include world-wide users, I can see 35 million users being a reasonable statistic. If we're talking about just the USA though, depending on the definition of "blind and low-vision," I found figures between 8 million [1] and 22.5 million [2].

[1]- https://nfb.org/blindness-statistics [2] - http://www.afb.org/info/blindness-statistics/adults/facts-an...

They mean in the USA, it's based on a misintepretation of the graph below the quoted phrase, or on poor wording on their part.

The graph says there are as many vision-impaired American internet users as there Canadian internet users - not the entire population - around 20-25 millions (the graph is hard to read). I'm sceptical of that number because it suggests ~10% of the USA is vision impaired, seems too high.

Anyway the only reason I care is that I'm Canadian ;)

If the numbers include older people who undergo the usual loss of near sight vision, it isn't so hard to believe. I think a lot of web developers are young and forget that older people use the internet and that older users may have a hard time seeing the small font some webpages use.

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