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Living with Disabilities
Personas, or user profiles, can be particularly helpful when designing websites that will accomodate people with disabilities. Unlike advertising-type personas that focus on psychology, personas for persons with disabilities have a tangible physiological and technological component as well. Personas can make it easier to design for persons with very different life experiences from your own.
Accessibility texts often use this approach. The following personas are patterned after and somewhat informed by those contained in "The Flash Usability Guide" and "Dive into Accessibility."
Low Vision
Lawrence has an eye disease known as Macular Degeneration. It is a degenerative condition that may eventually lead to total blindness, but at present he is able to read text that is magnified by using the periphery of his vision. He has a large monitor and has set his text size to "larger" and "Arial bold" in Internet Explorer. He doesn't use a screen magnifier because it disrupts overall context for the site and slows him down by magnifying everything at once. When his sight deteriorates further, he will switch to a text only browser and screen magnifier.
Design Considerations
Lawrence benefits from sites that are constructed with relative font sizes, flexible tables and cascading style sheets. These permit his browser to override website settings, improve readability, and resize the site while retaining its overall look and feel. He is often frustrated by websites that have fixed text sizes and button images with small lettering (since images are unaffected by resizing text).
Blind
Barbara has been blind since a boating accident two years ago. Her knowledge and proficiency in braille is limited, so she relies heavily on recorded books and her JAWS screen reader. She also values the time savings and convenience the Internet provides her. Barbara employs a variety of techniques to navigate the Internet, using keyboard commands in Internet Explorer to go from site to site, and, within sites, accesskeys to maneuver from page to page. Once she reaches a page of interest (which she discerns from its title), she listens to JAWS' page summary. She may press "INS + F7" to hear a list of links within the page, skip to page content, then move from link to link by tabbing to find relevant content.
Design Considerations
Barbara benefits from websites that are logically structured, hierarchical and well-labeled. This enbles her to "scan" the page for content using JAWS. Concise page titles, section headings, alt text for information containing images, tabindexing, and meaningful link titles enable her to get around in an orderly and efficient way. She is frustrated by sites that do not define links, have confusing labeling, and have illogical tabbing.
Hearing Impaired
Harold is a deaf student at a well-regarded university in the Midwest. Since the web has primarily been a visual medium, he has not had the same challenges as visually-impaired users. That is changing, however, as more and more websites include Flash animation. Harold surmises that many include audio because they often make little sense in purely video form. More importantly, he is frustrated by the growing use of multimedia in his classes, since film clips sometimes do not have captions. Harold relies on a transcriber for class lectures, supplemented by the instructor's class notes.
Design Considerations
Harold is best served by sites that do not rely on audio to communicate information. The current design environment, however, is becoming multimedia which risks excluding hearing impaired persons. An obvious solution is to provide captioning; a second-best solution is transcription (Second-best since captioning benefits people without impaired hearing as well as those with cognitive disorders. See below.). Harold especially appreciates visual or tactile effects that accompany sound (such as a "beep") when a change of state occurs in an application.It is rare.
Motor control Impaired
Melinda has a mild case of Parkenson's Disease. She is finding it more difficult to use a mouse and increasingly surfs the Internet using the keyboard instead. When she gets tired she uses Dragon Naturally Speaking to run her computer and browser, but it is not as efficient nor as accurate as the keyboard and can be very frustrating.
Design Considerations
Melinda is best served by websites that provide large clicking areas around labels and those that minimize pointing and clicking. For example, being able to move directly from input box to input box, and from function to function with accesskeys makes using websites much easier for her to use.
Cognitively Challenged
Charles has a mild form of Traumatic Brain Injury (T B I) that he incurred in a serious automobile accident ten years ago. Through great effort and perseverance, and the support of family and health professionals, he has been able to rebuild much of his cognitive function. In fact, most people don't realize he has T B I and would be surprised to find out. Charles manages his deficit in short-term memory by sticking to routines, writing notes to himself, and avoiding situations (as best he can) where there is a great deal of distraction and noise.
Design Considerations
Charles can best navigate websites that have clear navigation, minimal distraction and meaningful labeling. Particularly helpful are bread crumb trails that show his current location within the site's hierarchy, and concise, labeled chunks of information.
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