At least 10million people in the UK are affected by cognitive disabilities. Ashley Nolan and Nicholas Oliver of Precedent suggest easy ways you can make your sites more accessible to them
For users with a cognitive disability, accessing your website may be as frustrating as trying to read a Latin version of War and Peace. Yet for many web professionals, this type of issue is relatively unknown. While visual and hearing problems have been on the accessibility radar for a long time, cognitive ones are often ignored.
More well-known conditions include autism, Down’s syndrome, dyscalculia and dyslexia. However, considering it from a purely functional standpoint, a person with a cognitive disability will have difficulties with one or more of the following: reading, attention, numbers and calculations, memory and problem solving.
That list relates to many aspects of a website, from the amount of content on a page to shopping baskets and forms. While it’s crucial to be aware of situations that affect your users, it’s equally important to ensure that your solutions don’t pigeonhole your website as being optimised for one condition or even a group of conditions, such as cognitive disabilities. Even if you ask yourself, “What accessibility requirements do my users have?” you’re still unlikely to have a conclusive list that covers everyone.
While precise figures are hard to obtain, the National Autistic Society (NAS) estimates that more than 500,000 people in the UK have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and BUPA states that 10 per cent of people are dyslexic. To put that into context, if you combined every student at a university in Britain, you would still be two million short of the approximate 6.5million people who have these two conditions alone.
These statistics aren’t referenced to try and radically change how you think about creating websites. Doing that with cognitive disability in mind is largely about reaffirming the common sense accessibility standards that many of you will already be adhering to.