Personas to consider for Visual Accessibility

An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues

Taken from Anne Gibson's An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues, where she describes a variety of her friends in family in the style of personas, that should be considered in usability testing, and seen as an inspiration as to why web accessibility is so important.

Consider the following from her "alphabet":

A - is blind, and has been since birth. He’s always used a screen reader, and always used a computer. He’s a programmer, and he’s better prepared to use the web than most of the others on this list.
D - is color blind. Most websites think of him, but most people making PowerPoint presentations or charts and graphs at work do not.
G - was diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age. Because of his early and ongoing treatment, most people don’t know how much work it takes for him to read. He prefers books to the Internet, because books tend to have better text and spacing for reading.
H - is a fluent English speaker but hasn’t been in America long. She’s frequently tripped up by American cultural idioms and phrases. She needs websites to be simple and readable, even when the concept is complex.
I - has epilepsy, which is sometimes triggered by stark contrasts in colors, or bright colors (not just flashing lights). I has to be careful when visiting brightly-colored pages or pages aimed for younger people.
J - doesn’t know that he’s developed an astigmatism in his right eye. He does know that by the end of the day he has a lot of trouble reading the screen, so he zooms in the web browser to 150% after 7pm.
L - has lazy-eye. Her brain ignores a lot of the signal she gets from the bad eye. She can see just fine, except for visual effects that require depth perception such as 3-D movies.
M - can’t consistently tell her left from her right. Neither can 15% of adults, according to some reports. Directions on the web that tell her to go to the top left corner of the screen don’t harm her, they just momentarily make her feel stupid.
O - has age-related macular degeneration. It’s a lot like having the center of everything she looks at removed. She can see, but her ability to function is impacted. She uses magnifiers and screen readers to try to compensate.
P - has Multiple Sclerosis, which affects both her vision and her ability to control a mouse. She often gets tingling in her hands that makes using a standard computer mouse for a long period of time painful and difficult.
Q - is ninety-nine. You name the body part, and it doesn’t work as well as it used to.
R - was struck by a car crossing a busy street. It’s been six months since the accident, and his doctors think his current headaches, cognitive issues, and sensitivity to sound are post-concussion syndrome, or possibly something worse. He needs simplicity in design to understand what he’s reading.
T - has a learning disability that causes problems with her reading comprehension. She does better when sentences are short, terms are simple, or she can listen to an article or email instead of reading it.
U - was born premature 38 years ago — so premature that her vision was permanently affected. She has low vision in one eye and none in the other. She tends to hold small screens and books close to her face, and lean in to her computer screen.
W - had a stroke in his early forties. Now he’s re-learning everything from using his primary arm to reading again.
X - just had her cancerous thyroid removed. She’s about to be put on radioactive iodine, so right now she’s on a strict diet, has extremely low energy, and a lot of trouble concentrating. She likes things broken up into very short steps so she can’t lose her place.
Y - was in a car accident that left her with vertigo so severe that for a few weeks she couldn’t get out of bed. The symptoms have lessened significantly now, but that new parallax scrolling craze makes her nauseous to the point that she shuts scripting off on her computer.