Other parts in this series can be found here:
Thinking about Thinking - Attention
I’ve had this idea floating around my head for a few weeks on how the various “forms” of web or application-focused accessibility work for users. Where “form” is defined as “the way in which a particular population accesses information”. Let’s take an “easy” example - a web page. You’re here, reading this text in some fashion and thinking over that information. You’re forming ideas of your own, memories of your own, and generally assimilating the information you’re reading into your own mind.
I mean, I assume you’re thinking about this. Otherwise, why stick around?
In this example, for a non-disabled, physically capable Vitruvian Ideal of A Person persons, accessibility to a webpage happens mainly through sight based processing. Vitruvian users look ant the screen, they read the text, process that text in some fashion, and send it off to memory for future retrieval.
For the rest of us anti-Vitruvian shrubs, we may need to acquire information through less “ideal” means. I, for example, wear glasses which mostly work to read screens for work though some scenarios get a little tricky since I have astigmatism. For folks with no sight, their information acquisition comes from either hearing, like through a read aloud tool, or touch through refreshable braille displays. That information capture is fairly well understood and addressed. We only have a few ways to sense the world that are fairly well understood. So if a user has some issues with their sight, they can take in information by sound. If the have an isssue with their ears too, there’s touch. Etc etc etc.
Where I’m going around in my head is…
We kinda gloss over the process of understanding in accessibility related to physical senses. Much of the work done by groups like the W3C with the WCAG works to support gettting information into the person and sort of stops there? The COGA workgroup is working hard trying to create guidelines to add to he WCAG so we have better guidance for supporting cognitive disabilities. But like.. brains are hard?
You can follow their work here: [https://www.w3.org/WAI/about/groups/task-forces/coga/]
I’m very much a systems-oriented person. I like to build structures for understanding as a way to inform decisions and, in my job, to direct how we advance accessibility of our software. We have a pretty good grounding in accessibility for physical sensation and how to build structures into technology to support users with disabilities in those areas.
What I think this means is starting with the basic processes of cognition and bucketing out the stages and linking up understood disabilities in current literature. I’m mostly trying to organize existing information as a way to identify what I already know - like what existing WCAG criteria support which aspects of cognitive disability - and try to locate any gaps in what I know. I have to start somewhere, right, to organize this stuff for my own brain.
So let’s look at the very basics of cognition to start? Yes.
The very, very crude break down of information processing looks like this:
This is a simplification of the Atkinson & Shiffrin multi store model of memory which.. is probably the easiest to understand but isn’t super-current. #1 and #2 are the process of sensation and the subsequent steps are the processing of that information.
In the earlier example of you reading this text, #1 is: this text existing at the URL you found yourself at. It exists (insofar as we can prove that it exists when we aren’t attending to it… [it only took a few hundred words to get to a philosophy question]! Hooray!
Now, #2, something happpened to bring you to this URL. I probably posted it to Threads when I published. Maybe LinkedIn if I actually ever do anything with my LinkedIn profile. Or similar.
#4 is where things get interesting for what I’m trying to do. Attention. Attention disabilities like ADHD describe issues a person has in attending to information - making themselves focus on a Something in order to do some task with it.
once attention happens, we can process information in #5 through recognition of patterns like words, shapes, or sounds. A person’s ability to do that can be affected by various thinks like visual agnosia which prevents a person from rexignizing patterns in space.
And so on.
I think I’ll start with the ordinal list above and attempt to catalog disabilities that can be associated with those basic phases of cognition. My thought is that creating categories organized by step in the cognitive process helps build a framework for organizing accessibility and usability principles into something more discussable. Then maybe I can figure something out?
IDK but if I don’t write down some of these ideas, I’m probably going to keep having troubles sleeping.
The Vitruvian Man
Atkinson, R.C. and Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). ‘Human memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes’.
Published on August 13, 2024