Fig1. Persona Spectrum for cognitive disability

I recently did the course ‘Accessibility: Designing for all’ on the Interactive Design Foundation platform, which gave me a paradigm shift toward accessibility issues. I realized that designing for people with disabilities is indeed, designing for everyone.

Designers need to have empathy for people with disabilities to create accessible designs. However, many people find it difficult to empathize because they cannot imagine the frustrations that people with disabilities go through… or so they think.

A great picture that shows different states of permanent, temporary, and situational disability, is the Persona Spectrum, found in the Microsoft Inclusive toolkit manual. It highlights the various states of disability in the areas of touch, sight, hearing, and speech and it made a huge impact on me.

As a mum, I have experienced some difficulty with doing everyday things, while clutching a baby with one arm, like someone who is living with only one arm. Now throw in some high-pitched screaming and wriggling from baby dearest and this mum quickly progress to a one-armed person with cognitive disability.

In this scenario, the person with one arm or cognitive disability is in a permanent state of disability while I am in a situational state of disability. There are also those who are in a temporary state of disability, perhaps due to an arm injury which will eventually heal.

Once I recalled my varying states of situational and temporary disability over the years, I instantly became more empathetic towards people who live with permanent disabilities.

As I thought more about the persona spectrum for disabilities, I wondered how various states of disability in thinking might be represented with icons to inspire empathy in amongst designers. To do this, it is necessary to determine what to classify as temporary, permanent, and situational.

I have grouped various conditions under three disability states as follows:

Permanent cognitive disability could be because of congenital Intellectual challenges or irreversible brain injury.

Temporary cognitive disability could be due to illness, medication, exhaustion, dehydration, intoxication, overeating, starvation and so on.

Situational cognitive disability could result from extreme emotions such as rage, grief, and elation.

I have represented these in the picture at the top.

I do not see this as being exhaustive rather it is an attempt to share my insights around the cognitive aspects of disability.

Hopefully, this will start a conversation, which will in turn generate more contributions in this area and elicit more empathy among designers.