One does not have to be a web developer to help make a site usable by people with cognitive disabilities. Creating clear, simple website content is equally important.

What Are Cognitive Disabilities?

Cognitive disabilities are experienced by people, for example, who have dyslexia, or attention deficit disorder (ADD), or depression, and by all of us as we age. Cognitive disabilities are functionally characterized, in large part, by poor comprehension, attention and memory.

Within the United States, there are no widely-used and accepted definitions of cognitive disability. However, WebAIM has a functional definition of cognitive disabilities, which is good for web developers.

How Can a Website Be Made Usable by People with Cognitive Disabilities?

Using plain language throughout a site is a great start. There are five good design features and five good content features that would definitely make a website easier to use by people with cognitive disabilities. WebAIM has an informative article about evaluating cognitive web accessibility.

How Can a Website Be Determined Good for People with Cognitive Disabilities?

A terrific resource is WebAIM’s cognitive accessibility checklist, which is very useful for web developers.

I have been evaluating the cognitive accessibility of websites by organizations that serve people with cognitive disabilities. To date, I have found two of twenty sites to be accessible. For information about the methodology and the results of this work, see Cognitive Web Accessibility: Assessments.

There has also been research in this area. For a recent example, see Improving Web Searching for People with Cognitive Disabilities.

The best way to determine if a website is good for people with cognitive disabilities is to have them test it!

Additional Resources

• promoters of cognitive web accessibility
• publicized related research
• indexes of cognitive web accessibility resources
• Clear Helper Blog: Web Accessibility for People with Intellectual / Cognitive Disabilities

Previous, Related Blog Posts

• Making Websites Usable by People with Cognitive Disabilities
• Examples of Web Use by People with Cognitive Disabilities
• Making Web Sites Usable By Everyone

Note: Information about me and my work.

It does not have to be difficult to make websites usable by people with cognitive disabilities. They benefit by the same design features employed for people with physical disabilities. The main difference is they also need website content that is accessible to them.

Some Good Design Features

• consistent page layout with headings and liberal white space;
• minimal distractions, such as advertisements or unrelated content;
• large text (font) size, with minimal use of italics;
• straightforward, consistent site navigation; and
• site search that corrects spelling, offers relevant synonyms, and presents simple results.

Some Good Content Features

• succinct, plain language that is literal (e.g., no colloquialisms, sarcasm or jargon);
• page sections defined visibly, with textual content written in chunks;
• simple summaries for complex- or lengthy content;
• pairing of textual content with contextually-relevant images, icons and graphics; and
• presentation of textual content via video and/or text-to-speech alternatives.

Example Websites

To date, I have found two websites that have made significant efforts to be usable by people with cognitive disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities.

People First

The People First site features a large site-navigation menu (the following image). For menu options, there are contextually-relevant icons, which are also used throughout the site.
The Mencap site incorporates many captioned videos (example image following) as an alternative to textual content, and relevant images to augment it. The site’s My Life section is specifically designed for constituents, with plain language; simple navigation; and lots of images and videos.

• All of the listed features would help everyone, even people without disabilities.
• More information about me and my work can be found on the Clear Helper Blog.

People with cognitive disabilities use the web for the same reasons we all do, primarily: to communicate; to consume content; and to purchase goods and services. Where they differ is in how able they are to engage in these endeavors, and to overcome the barriers presented by websites not designed with simplicity in mind.

How easy is it to find and buy something?

Shopping sites are good examples of complexity. Retailers apparently believe that to attract customers their websites must have animated promotions, display large numbers of products, and employ sophisticated site-navigation systems. These same features overwhelm people with cognitive disabilities.

The following video is of Martin visiting the Amazon.com website. Note the one action common sense would say Amazon would want to make the easiest, that of purchasing an item, is quite difficult for him to accomplish. He makes good points about why that is.

How easy is it to find information?

Other than shopping, common interests among people with intellectual disabilities I have interviewed include:

• using social media sites and web-based email; and
• finding information related to local movie schedules, food recipes, self advocacy and disabilities.

Related to the latter interest, I interviewed Mary about her use of the DisabilityInfo.org website, the home to this blog.

Mary told me the home page, represented by the following image, was too full of choices.  I designed it, and I agree with her. It is cluttered with many links and images.

Trying to use the site’s search box proved equally overwhelming for Mary. Like most people, she did not know what human service terms to use to find relevant information. Tangentially-relevant search terms and spelling errors also thwarted her efforts to find the information she needed. Once Mary found some search results, trying to understand their content and determining their relevancy was troublesome.

Conclusion

Finding and understanding information is very difficult for people with cognitive disabilities. It is just as important for DisabilityInfo.org to facilitate those tasks as it is for Amazon.com to enable its users to buy products. The next blog post will focus on how to make websites more usable by people with cognitive disabilities.

Notes

• For more information about how people with cognitive disabilities use the web, see my related interviews.
• A future version of the DisabilityInfo.org website will feature methods to find information easily.
• The video of Martin visiting Amazon.com is from a presentation, “Accessibility Beyond Code”, by Antonia Hyde, at an event on “Cognition and Accessibility” held by Standards.Next on September 19, 2009, in London.
• Readers may want to watch that video using the Easy YouTube Player, which was designed for use by people with cognitive disabilities.
• More information about me and my work can be found on the Clear Helper Blog.

Billions of websites offer great information and services. Yet the vast majority are not designed to be usable by everyone, especially people with disabilities. Those websites that are designed to be accessible are reasonably focused on people with physical disabilities. Almost none of those, unfortunately, are designed for people with cognitive disabilities.

Problems with comprehension, memory, attention, or problem solving, which are experienced by people with cognitive disabilities, are just as important for web designers to circumvent as those experienced by people with physical disabilities. There are two significant reasons that web designers should make their sites usable by everyone.

1. There are millions of people who have disabilities. All of us will acquire disabilities as we age. Thinking quickly and easily will become more difficult. Our vision and hearing will likely deteriorate as well.
2. Excluding millions of people from using websites, or making it difficult for them to do so, is bad for business. It does not matter if a website’s purpose is to make money or to provide a public service. Excluding people equals mission failure.

Working To Solve The Problems

Organizations and activists around the world are helping web designers make their sites usable by everyone. There are a few, such as I, who are exploring how to make websites usable by people with cognitive disabilities. I have spent my entire professional career serving that population, particularly those with intellectual disabilities and/or autism. Since the web was born, I have been developing web sites as usable by people with disabilities as technology and funding has allowed.

A couple of years ago, I decided to combine those two passions in earnest. I have been working to explore and to develop best practices of web usability/accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities. One of my goals is to develop a website to teach web skills to people with intellectual disabilities, and that itself is accessible to them. For more information, see my Clear Helper Blog.

Related Future Blog Posts

This post is the first in a four-part series. Upcoming topics will be:

• using web sites from the perspective of people with cognitive disabilities;
• what can be done by web designers to make their sites more accessible for people with cognitive disabilities; and
• resources that will help everyone interested in cognitive web accessibility.

Background Information

• To find out more about how to make websites usable by people with disabilities, see W3C – Introduction to Web Accessibility.
• See more information about me and my work.