There are a fair few myths around concerning web accessibility. One of them is that it is all about blindness. But people with partial sight, Deaf, physically disabled people and people with cognitive and learning disabilities also experience barriers to web accessibility, and to other forms of information for that matter.
In particular little attention has been paid to the large group of people with cognitive and learning impairments by the web world. So I was particularly pleased some time ago to learn that WebAIM, one of my favourite accessibility sites, and one that is highly respected one internationally, was planning some research in this neglected area of accessibility.
This is an area of accessibility which has few standards or recommendations and about which very little research has been done. As WebAIM says the area of cognitive and learning impairment is complex and accessibility considerations are difficult to identify.
WebAIM has undertaken a project to assist web developers to create web sites that are highly accessible to users with cognitive and learning disabilities. They set out to research recommendations and expert opinion on cognitive web accessibility, test the impact of selected recommendations, implement a set of best practice rules into evaluation tools, and report on findings. They want to implement and report on real strategies that web developers could implement to increase the accessibility of their web pages.
WebAIM conducted a thorough literature review and then used their findings to identify key aspects of design which would be useful to web developers and machine testable. They tested the selected items on a group of users with cognitive and learning impairments.
While they have not yet produced a final report their overview of findings will be useful.
The following observations should be read with the overview of findings
- Make your page appear easy to use.
- Simplicity, error recovery, and intuitiveness can increase efficiency and confidence.
- Keep visual aids clean.
- A text alternative, a prominent pause feature, and an ability to quickly rewind or replay the video allow users to use multimedia to go at their own pace and take in all of the information.
- Sometimes making something more visually obvious also makes it so much different that it can be difficult to find.
- While organizational elements (headings, lists, etc.) can help accessibility, they should be clearly differentiable from other elements.
