I bet you know someone who is totally smart but who never seems to understand the teacher’s assignment. Or a good friend who is mystified by the subtleties of the recent comedy-of-manners film you just saw. Or maybe you are seeing your mother or father show signs of cognitive decline after years of being the smartest person you knew.
More than 16 million people in the United States are living with cognitive impairment. Only about one percent of people will go through life without any cognitive decline. Even if various forms of age-related dementia are discounted, millions of children and adults have learning or intellectual disabilities. And many of them have disabilities that do not impair their underlying intelligence, but rather the way they absorb, retrieve and make sense of information.
Cognitive impairments present a particularly difficult problem for interaction designers since types of impairments are so varied and manifestations of a single impairment – for example, ADHD – differ between individuals. Consider, for example, the following list of functional cognitive impairments and their different expression in several types of cognitive impairment, including ADHD and autism, two of the most common cognitive disabilities for school-aged children:
Functional Disabilities By Common Cognitive Impairments
(including temporary impairments)
All these functional impairments are especially limiting in a digital educational environment where there is no restatement and little chance to ask questions. Digital classrooms are filled with these students. An estimate of the number of students with cognitive impairments at Michigan State University (therefore, intelligent enough to get into a good school) is more than 2,220 — and that’s just undergrads! And as the number of children diagnosed with ADHD and autism continues to grow, so will enrollment.
The potential for misunderstanding is staggering — students unable to read charts and graphs (but perfectly able to grasp complicated concepts), or make sense of images and faces, or interpret emotions. What would “put yourself in the shoes of your user” mean to a student who doesn’t understand abstract expression?
Many of the design solutions fall under the heading of general usability, but take on an added urgency. And some require XD professionals to recommit themselves to well-known principles of accessible design. Consider, for example, interpretation of tables, charts, and graphs.
Hidden Meanings
Tables, charts and graphs are often incomprehensible to individuals with hidden disabilities (and to many of those without). They can see the number in every cell, but they can’t extract the meaning of the chart.
Accessibility guidelines require that Alt Text be provided to make the presence of the chart clear to someone with vision impairment. As a content strategy professional, I know the varying ways that Alt Text can be used. At best, an Alt Text description is brief and very high-level: “A chart showing functional impairments by diagnosis.”
More often, the Alt Text is even less illuminating. Sometimes, it is even co-opted in use of SEO.
We can do better.
Educational materials and digital classrooms, in particular, should do better. Explanation of charts and graphs should be robust, and should provide the information that should be extracted from the chart. Material should be presented in more than one way so that students who may not even know they have a cognitive impairment can make sense of it.