Article via Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility
Digital exclusion is a societal challenge that IT professionals can and should help tackle. Persons whose brain doesn’t function in a way that is considered typical are among the victims of digital exclusion for IT systems are rarely designed for and with persons with cognitive disabilities. Cognitive disabilities can stem from dementia, ADHD, autism, intellectual disabilities and hundreds of other conditions that affect the way the brain processes information. A quarter of the population has a cognitive disability or is neurodivergent, and as the population ages, the proportion increases. IT systems that are cognitively accessible therefore to not ignore a quarter of the market. Furthermore, cognitively accessible IT systems tend to be preferred by users without cognitive disabilities as they decrease users’ cognitive load.
IT professionals can follow W3C standards for cognitive accessibility, and many countries now have accessibility legislations. Ignoring cognitive accessibility in design poses compliance risks. Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility (hereafter “Open”) developed a framework to test and increase the cognitive accessibility of IT systems. The framework centres on two main dimensions: system learnability (how easily users pick up the system) and user cognitive workload (mental demand, time pressure, frustration, performance). Understanding system learnability and workload means you’ll be better positioned to catch usability issues early, for example, onboarding flows, time-sensitive prompts, or authentication steps may pose high cognitive load for some users.
The framework was developed and tested in a study involving 29 participants with diverse cognitive accessibility needs and using an iterative design process of a prototype voice payment interface. The study was conducted to inform policy development at the Bank of Canada, and has implications for IT professionals, including those working in fintech and voice activated systems. The iterative process allowed for the rapid identification of cognitive accessibility issues. Key adaptation changes included: improved visual cues (colour aid), better voice-command recognition (“I don’t know” responses), more time for user responses, and removal of confusing steps. For simple tasks, first-round completion rate was ~36.9 % but after iteration jumped to ~95.7 %. The study confirms that a co-designed interface achieves high learnability and low cognitive load for groups often excluded by standard interfaces.
The framework also offers concrete metrics you can integrate into design, testing and governance.
System Learnability sub-measures:
- First-use learnability (how many tasks a naïve user can complete independently)
- Steepness of the learning curve (how fast users improve over repeated tasks)
- Efficiency of the ultimate plateau (once users have learned the system, how efficient they become)
Workload (Cognitive Load) sub-measures:
- Mental demand (how much thinking)
- Temporal demand (how much time pressure)
- Frustration (subjective)
- Performance (error rate, task completion)
The study also revealed that people with cognitive disabilities frequently have difficulty with user authentication. This should not be surprising given that research has shown that the principles of universal design are often not applied in authentication method design. Authentication is a huge potential barrier to users because if they can’t authenticate, they can’t use a system at all.
To learn more, you can access the BoC’s technical report here.
To learn more about the Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility, follow the link.