Colour blind friendly palette

All visual elements, including illustrations, have been designed using the project palette. This colour scheme was devised using a colour blindness simulator to ensure inclusivity across all graphics.

Info not dependent on colour

In addition to colour, visualisations include a secondary indicator when displaying information. These alternative methods include detailed labels, supplementary icons, size, shape and pattern.

High contrast

Text is displayed on a high contrast background and special care has been taken to ensure hyperlinks are identifiable by implementing high contrast between their text and the background.

Alternative text

Images have been tagged with meaningful descriptions that provide contextual alternative text. This approach was taken to ensure those using screen readers understand the semantic meaning of the image.

Clear HTML structure

A comprehensible page structure has been created by using a web-builder (i.e. vev) and implementing appropriate heading tags (e.g. h1, h2, h3 etc.) across all text elements.

Multi-device compatibility

This project has been designed to enable viewing across multiple different devices. Implementing responsive development principles, content is scaled appropriately depending on the device.

Keyboard navigation

In desktop mode, the up and down arrow keys can be used to scroll through the web page. Alternatively, the tab key can be used as a "no mouse" option to aid navigation through menu cycles and interactive elements.

Although this is an international human rights obligation, it has been observed that not all persons with disabilities are disadvantaged equally. Using data provided by the IHME, this project digs into this topic further, focusing specifically on how biological sex impacts health equity.

Note: This data set includes only those health conditions / impairments that last longer than 6 months and are categorised as significant in severity.

Breakdown of disability prevalence by sex

Women are statistically more likely to experience some form of significant disability when compared to men. Approximately 57% of those estimated to be living with disability around the world are women, this equates to 795 million people.

Prevalence across disability cause group

When we explore the data further we see that mental, neurological and musculoskeletal disorders remain the top 3 most prevalent causes of disability among both sexes. However, disabilities caused by other non-communicable diseases are far more prevalent among the female population.

The animation below illustrates this through a series of charts which plot the prevalence of individual disability causes across the male, female and total populations.

Prevalence across disability cause groups

(split & ordered by sex)

Using a 100% stacked bar chart, we looked at how the population is split between the sexes for each disability cause group. Here, we observed a 77% skew toward the female population when exploring the prevalence of disabilities caused by other non-communicable diseases. This is closely followed by musculoskeletal and neurological disorders cause groups, which both show a significant bias toward women.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have observed that disabilities caused by substance use disorders significantly impact more men than women, with the data showing a 64% dominance in this area.

Prevalence across individual disability causes

(split & ordered by sex)

Breaking these aggregated cause groups down into their underlying causes we observe the following:

Musculoskeletal disorders

Women have a particular predisposition to disabilities caused by lower back pain, with 64% of all estimated cases being attributed to this population. They also proved to be the dominant sex when it came to all other disabilities arising from musculoskeletal disorders, apart from gout, where we observed that men were 3 times more likely to live with a disability as a result of this condition.

Neurological disorders

Migraines are approximately 1.6 times more likely to result in a disability amongst women. In addition to this, tension-type headaches were also skewed in their favour. Several other neurological disorders were found to adversely impact women, however, the data did show that men had a slight predisposition toward disabilities caused by Parkinson’s (55%) and idiopathic epilepsy (52%).

Other Non-communicable diseases

Drilling down into the IHME’s grouping of other non-communicable diseases, it becomes clear why there is a 77% skew toward the female population. Included within this aggregation are health conditions which solely impact women e.g. uterine fibroids and endometriosis.

It is also estimated that approximately 27 million women are living with a disability caused as a result of some form of gynaecological disease - put into perspective, that is equivalent to 7% of the global female population [1]. 

Substance use disorders

Across all disability causes, from cocaine to alcohol use, men were significantly more likely [2] to be living with a disability as a result of substance use disorders. This was observed most dramatically for alcohol use, where the data showed that men were 3.5 times more likely to be living with a disability as a result of this form of substance abuse, than women.

[2] Opioid use disorder is the only exception where prevalence is roughly on par between both sexes.

Breakdown of disability prevalence by severity

In terms of severity, the data shows that 11% of all causes of disability worldwide are categorised as severe in nature. This remains broadly consistent when comparing across sexes, with the female and male populations highlighting a global severity average of 10% and 12% respectively.

Prevalence across disability cause groups

(split & ordered by severity)

Comparing disability cause groups, it was observed that only skin & subcutaneous diseases and musculoskeletal disorders fall within ± 1% of the calculated severity average. In fact, substance use disorders, diabetes and kidney diseases, maternal and neonatal disorders, HIV aids and sexually transmitted infections and mental disorders, all significantly surpass 11%.

Most notably, it is estimated that 40% of individuals living with a disability caused by substance use disorder would categorise it as severe in nature. 

Prevalence across individual disability causes categorised as severe

(split & ordered by sex)

Zooming in on the top 5 disability cause groups categorised as severe in the previous graph, we drill down into their individual disability causes (e.g. schizophrenia as an individual disability rolling up to the wider mental disorder cause group) and present them in a 100% stacked bar chart.

Here, we observe that 13 of the 17 underlying causes are skewed toward the male population. An extreme example shows that for the estimated 14,306 cases of severe disability caused by syphilis, 95% of them were attributed to males.

Prevalence of sex specific disability causes by severity

There are also a number of disability causes that are sex specific (e.g. they only impact one sex, like testicular cancer). In total there are 10 causes that only impact the female population, with 19% of them being categorised as severe. Conversely, there are 2 causes that only impact the male population, with 12% of them being categorised as severe.