Personas of Persons with Disabilities

I recently pre­sented on dis­abil­ity aware­ness in build­ing acces­si­ble web­sites to a group of inter­ac­tion design­ers. At the end, I was asked about exam­ples of a spe­cific per­son with a dis­abil­i­ties as well as design con­sid­er­a­tions for that per­son. This is what I found:

Per­sonas of Per­sons with Dis­abil­i­ties and Rec­om­mended Design Considerations

• Fluid, a user expe­ri­ence project for open source projects, cre­ated the per­sona of Sara Wind­sor, a fac­ulty mem­ber who is blind and out­lines some con­sid­er­a­tions in design­ing an acces­si­ble user expe­ri­ence for her.
• Liv­ing with Dis­abil­i­ties, pro­files for a blind per­son, low vision, hear­ing impaired, motor con­trol impaired, and cog­ni­tively chal­lenged, with design con­sid­er­a­tions for each– from the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan.

Per­sonas of Per­sons with Disabilities

• Two per­sonas– Roger Retiree and Kim, College-Student
• Exam­ples for Per­sonas from a Web Acces­si­bil­ity Project (PDF) , fea­tur­ing Tracy Young rep­re­sent­ing young peo­ple with visual impair­ments and Ger­ald Old­man rep­re­sent­ing old peo­ple with disabilities.
• Dis­abled Per­sonas from JA-SIG includ­ing Brent Blind­man, Melissa Motorim­paired and Clark Colorblind.
• Uni­fied Mod­el­ing Lan­guage Actors: “Per­sonas with Dis­abil­i­ties”, I’m not sure what the title means, but this arti­cle con­tains a list of per­sonas and a descrip­tion of how they were created.
• The WAI has a draft of the per­sonas that they used in their redesign, includ­ing a per­son with a disability

Regard­less of whether or not you use per­sonas, the exam­ples are help­ful to go through to bet­ter under­stand acces­si­bil­ity from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, even though that per­spec­tive is that of a make believe person.

If the per­sonas aren’t doing it for you, take a gan­der at some of these videos and expe­ri­ences to get a bet­ter feel for how per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties access the web:

• Assis­tive­Ware videos on com­puter acces­si­bil­ity, don’t miss the user pro­files of the peo­ple in the videos (via Roger Johans­son).
• WebAIM Dis­abil­ity Simulations
• Screen reader and screen mag­ni­fi­ca­tion videos

Addi­tional Resources

• Includ­ing Acces­si­bil­ity Con­sid­er­a­tions in Personas
• Usabil­ity: more than skin deep from Lisa Her­rod (audio avail­able here)
• How many users with dis­abil­i­ties should you include when con­duct­ing a usabil­ity test for accessibility?
• Per­sonas on Wikipedia
• From Where I Sit” Video Series, eight stu­dents from the Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­sity dis­cuss their expe­ri­ences in the col­lege class­room as stu­dents with dis­abil­i­ties (via Do-IT Videos page)