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Questions from gap analysis
How People with Disabilities use the Web was initially developed to help people understand the range of different approaches people take when accessing the web. At the time, the idea of someone with sight loss accessing the web was difficult for many to comprehend. Awareness of accessibility has improved tremendously but there are still aspects of how disabled people experience that many web content creators are not aware of.
As a resource, personas can be a useful way to aggregate and communicate user research findings and provide a sounding board for design teams to test ideas against. They are not a proxy for actual people being involved in the design process but can be a useful tool. When creating personas for this purpose user needs are often promoted as aspects of the personas experience that can be used to drive design decisions.
There is the opportunity to incorporate aspects of the latter purpose of personas within this resource by including top barriers and top needs for each person. This may take away from the story and the human element of the resource, but does provide something that could bring more awareness of those needs to design teams.
Should the purpose of the resource be subtly moved to providing something that design and content creators can use to better address the needs of disabled people?
Needs and barriers could be seen as two sides of the same coin. Including barriers allows for a clear presentation of things to avoid. Having both does add more to the persona that might distract.
Should both needs and barriers be included?
There is always a challenge in ensuring that the they are detailed enough to be useful but comprehensive enough to cover the range of identified user needs. Accessibility is a difficult area to consider this question in as individual experience can vary hugely.
Looking across the range of persona resources reviewed there are two high level gaps: autistic spectrum condition (ASC) and partial sight/low vision.
Yun does have low vision and his story does talk about these needs. Does this take away from a broader exploration of the needs of older adults? Is there an opportunity to explore partial sight/low vision needs with a story specific to those conditions?
Most of the other resources included a persona of either someone with an autistic spectrum condition. This story is not included within How People with Disabilities use the Web. There are needs identified within this group that are not reflected in other stories. Should this be a candidate to include?
A broader question is how to decide what to include and exclude? The resource would also look to point to more focused work, such as COGA, to allow for anything that was excluded which might reduce what is necessary to include.
The needs and barriers identified were identified from the persona documents. They do not represent a comprehensive analysis of the needs of anyone with the identified condition or impairment.
A question that arises as a result of this approach is whether there are any needs or barriers that have been missed that should be added? For example, there is little about sighted keyboard only users.