Illustrations for Web Accessibility

<aside> 🧩 How this fits into the course

Best practices for web accessibility are built on top of an understanding of cognitive and physical disabilities. My previous coursework in abnormal psychology gave me a foundational understanding of cognitive disabilities like learning disabilities and ASD. Now, I use this project to explore how webpages can be designed to be accessible to those with cognitive disabilities.

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Why illustrations?

Since the last few weeks of my independent study are dedicated to accessibility, for my final assignment, I wanted to write about a topic in accessibility from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, just like the other articles I wrote for this course. However, as I dove into WCAG, reviewed my coursework in abnormal psychology, read articles by Sheri Byrne-Haber, and watched videos by the amazing people from Deque Systems, I began to realize that there is very little I can contribute to the conversation as an undergrad in cognitive neuroscience and an able-bodied person.

Around the same time as I was stuck on selecting a topic, I ran across Maggie Appleton’s amazing illustrations for abstract programming concepts and was immediately obsessed. I really appreciate how she was able to use visual metaphors that highlight the important ideas in coding concepts. And the illustrations are just so clean and gorgeous.

Maggie’s illustrations reminded me that rephrasing, simplifying, and breaking down complex topics can also be worthwhile work. So, instead of making myself formulate new thoughts about web accessibility when there are so many more qualified people researching and writing about it, I decided to illustrate some cognitive accessibility success criteria from WCAG. This process allowed me to dig into a few specific success criteria and simplify what I learned into intuitive illustrations.

What I learned from this process

• Many success criteria benefit both people with physical disabilities and people with cognitive disabilities. When I wrote the syllabus for this course, I divided the accessibility unit by cognitive accessibility and physical accessibility, thinking that there is a clear distinction between the two. Now I know that many accessibility practices benefit both groups. Users with cognitive disabilities can use screen readers, and users with low vision can benefit from clearly communicated input purposes.
• Some success criteria in WCAG are very specific and clean-cut, but others are more ambiguous. Criteria like “Identify input purpose” can be easily satisfied by adding “autocomplete” to HTML tags of forms, but other criteria like “focus order” recognize that there are multiple approaches to focus order that preserve meaning and operability.
• The simplest presentations take the longest time to plan. These illustrations took much longer to complete than I expected, since all of them went through multiple drafts and revisions, but I am happy with how they turned out!