WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Design Principles for Cognitive Disabilities

for

From: Paul R. Bohman
Date: Nov 8, 2006 10:00AM

Robinson, Norman B - Washington, DC wrote:

> I believe I'll have to disagree with you on your view of design for
> cognitive disabilities. I think anyone can design and be qualified.

Yes and no. I don't want to put myself in the position of discouraging
web developers to strive for cognitive disability access. I'm in favor
of cognitive disability access. At the same time, I've seen sites
designed specifically for people with cognitive disabilities. The ones
I'm thinking of at the moment are not public sites, unfortunately, so I
can only describe them. They have very sparse designs with very few
options. They have large, child-like icons, funny sounds (to make the
site game-like and engaging), and most people without cognitive
disabilities would find the text uninformative. In fact, the content of
the sites is not content that the "average" person would be interested
in in the first place. They're not designed to be universal. They're
designed just for people with cognitive disabilities.

I think those sites are fantastic for their target audience. I also
think they're almost completely useless to everyone else. So how do I
reconcile this? Would I recommend that all sites be designed like this?
No. Would I recommend that designers incorporate some of the basic
principles of these designs (simplicity, clean design, and so on [1]) in
their mainstream designs? Absolutely.

But that's the dilemma. I think it is very possible to have "mostly
universal" designs that accommodate the needs of most users, but I know
for a fact that truly universal designs are impossible. The more severe
the cognitive disability, the more drastically different the design has
to be. At some point along the scale, a person will be completely unable
to benefit from web content at all, and there is nothing a designer can
do about it.

Of course, when talking to web developers, I try to accentuate the
positive: Yes, you can make the site more usable to people with
cognitive disabilities. Yes, people with cognitive disabilities really
do want to use your site.

But among web accessibility professionals, I think we must be aware of
the limitations of our own advice.

I also think that most web accessibility professionals have never even
tried to make sites truly accessible to people with cognitive
disabilities. We don't have the collective experience. If you talk to
someone who specializes in special education, you'll soon realize that
resources for this target audience are designed with an entirely
different set of assumptions and principles in mind. They know much more
about cognitive disabilities than we do, because they deal with it
directly on a daily basis. In contrast, we (most of us) sit at our
computers typing markup and code, very much apart from this direct
experience with people with cognitive disabilities. We don't yet know
enough because we haven't yet really tried.

[1] See http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=9614 for my
full list of design principles

--

Paul R. Bohman
Administrative Faculty, College of Education & Human Development
Lead Architect of Web Services, Office of Technology Support
Technology Coordinator, Kellar Institute for Human disAbilities
George Mason University