
From creating persona-like character sheets to role-playing these characters during a project’s planning, design, development, and testing phases, you will learn how to improve the user experience-based development and overall accessibility of your products.
During this talk, Nick discussed some “non-developer characters” (NDCs), how they interact with websites and apps, and how taking the time to “role play” those characters can help improve accessibility.
At the end of the talk, you will have access to new tools and ways of thinking about features, content, and design, as well as approaches to testing.
Thanks to Our Sponsors
Watch the Recording
Read the Transcript
>> AMBER HINDS: Welcome to WordPress Accessibility Meetup, How D&D Can Improve Accessibility using Roleplay During All Phases of Product Development to Better Consider User Experience with Nick Croft, who is a Principal Developer at Reaktiv. I have a few announcements to share. If you haven’t been before, it’s good to know that we have a Facebook group that you can join to connect with other attendees in between meetups. It’s a great place to share things you’re working on, get advice, help other people. We talk about plugins, we talk about testing, all sorts of different things. You can find it if you just search for WordPress Accessibility on Facebook or if you go to facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility. Everyone always asks, is this being recorded? Yes, this session is being recorded. The recording will be available in about two weeks. That gives us time to edit the video, get corrected captions and a full transcript, and then we will post that up. You can find both upcoming meetups and all of the past recordings in one place if you go to equalizedigital.com/meetup. The other way to get notified is to join our email list.
If you go to equalizedigital.com/focus-state, then you can subscribe. If I did things right, you might also get prompted to subscribe if you aren’t already after the meetup is over when you leave Zoom. We send the emails out in advance of meetups to let people know when events are coming, and then every Wednesday we send a roundup of news and other accessibility information from around the web, and that is also where we include the recordings. A few people have asked for audio. You can get the audio only if you want to listen to this in podcast form in a couple weeks.
It will be out on our podcast, which you can find at accessibilitycraft.com. We are seeking additional sponsors for the meetup. While this is part of the official WordPress meetup program, they did tell us that the foundation does not have the funds to cover the cost of live captioning or transcriptions for our meetups or the recordings after they are complete. That is something that they said go out and find sponsors. If your company would be interested in helping to make this meetup possible and make it accessible for everyone, please reach out to us.
You can contact myself and Paula via email at meetup@equalizedigital.com. That is also a good email address to use if you have any suggestions for the meetup if you’re interested in speaking. I think we had a speaker change, and so we’re looking for someone for Thursday, March 6th. We are looking for a speaker coming up here pretty soon, or if you need any accommodations to make the meetup work for you, you can email us at that email address. I clicked something weird. I clicked one of my links. Sorry about that, guys. Hopefully, you can see this again.
I am Amber Hinds. If you aren’t familiar with me, I am one of the organizers for the meetup, and my company is Equalize Digital. We are a mission-driven organization focused on WordPress accessibility. Our WordPress plugin, Accessibility Checker, scans for accessibility problems and provides reports on the post-edit screen. You can learn more about us at equalizedigital.com. I’ve said that a bunch, but that is our website. We also have a sponsor today that I want to shout out, and that is GoDaddy. GoDaddy is very generously covering the cost of live captioning for this meetup event.
GoDaddy’s mission is to empower a worldwide community of entrepreneurs by giving them all the help and tools they need to grow online, including a simpler, safer WordPress experience. GoDaddy provides a managed WordPress experience that is as easy as it is effective. The latest version of WordPress comes pre-installed with exclusive themes, plugins, and tools to get you up and running quickly, with automated backups, updates, and malware removal, so that their pros can spend less time on monotonous maintenance and more time building their businesses.
You can learn more about GoDaddy at GoDaddy.com. We also always encourage people to tweet or message on whatever social media platforms you’re on to @GoDaddy and just say thank you for sponsoring captions for WordPress Accessibility Meetup. That helps them know that we gave them the shout-out we promised them, and also that it is valuable, and that encourages them to want to continue sponsoring captions for the meetup. If you have a moment, whatever social media platform you’re on, if you’re willing to just send them a quick thank you message, that is very helpful and we would appreciate that.
Some upcoming meetups to be aware of in February. On Thursday, February 6th at 10:00 AM Central Time, we will have Chris Scholtens talking about Digital Accessibility: Thinking Beyond WCAG and Compliance. On Monday, February 17th at 7:00 PM Central, so the same time slot on February 17th, Richard Hunt, who is an attorney, will be speaking about the law of accessible websites and applications. I’m going to add a spotlight here and pull up today’s speaker, my friend Nick Croft. I’m so excited to have him here with us.
If you’ve not had the opportunity to meet Nick yet, he is passionate about accessibility and has been for most of his career. He is, as I mentioned, a developer at Reaktiv and he took the time to improve his knowledge by earning the International Association of Accessibility Professionals Certification, including Web Accessibility Specialist, and he is a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies. Therefore, he has the Certified Professional in Web Accessibility Certification. He is also a Section 508 Trusted Tester for the United States federal testing standards.
Nick, we are so excited to have you here. I’m going to stop sharing and let you take over. While I am doing that, I want to give a quick note on two things. One is that we are going to utilize the Q&A feature. If you have any questions during the webinar and you want to post anything for Nick, please put that in the Q&A section. It’s a little easier for us to keep track of than if they go in the chat. The other item, just to get your gears going a little bit, is that Nick and I were talking about there might be some opportunity for some role-playing or participating in scenarios related to accessibility towards the end of the meetup.
Anyone who is interested, we will have an opportunity where you could potentially get promoted and come up here and be on camera with us and participate live. Start thinking about that as he’s giving his presentation, and we might give you the opportunity to volunteer and come on. Welcome, Nick, and I will hand it away to you.
>> NICK CROFT: Thank you very much for having me here. I am extremely excited to be talking about this, Using D&D to Improve Accessibility and User Experience in Every Development Phase. I’m currently sharing some slides. It literally just says Using D&D to Improve Accessibility and UX in Every Development Phase. As we go through this, I am planning on doing a little bit of an introduction to the topic. We’ll talk about– really someone asked earlier in the chat, what is D&D? D&D is Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a tabletop role-playing game.
We’re not strictly using D&D. We’re using the concepts that were introduced to us via D&D, so this idea of role-playing. Today’s talk started off really very different from the way it evolved. I’ll talk a little bit about that as we go, but I’m extremely excited because I’m going to be presenting a tool that I have been spending the past two and a half or so months developing that is intended to be helpful in understanding disability, understanding different concepts around disability, understanding access needs and barriers that prevent people from being able to get to those access needs.
The other thing that I’m really excited about with this tool, I’ve spent much of my professional life focused on digital accessibility. You may not know this about me, but I’m going to jump slides now because I’m going to talk about myself. Up on the slide, it says Nick Croft. It’s got a picture of me. I’m wearing my glasses like I have now. I have my dark hair pulled back in a ponytail like I have now and my dark bushy beard and mustache like I have now. The difference is I am wearing a striped shirt in the picture.
In real life, I am wearing a vibrant neon yellow shirt that says Camp No Limits, which I’ll talk about in a moment, and a dark flannel because it is 10 degrees outside and my office is 63 degrees Fahrenheit. The slide also says husband, father, dog owner, web accessibility specialist. Those are things that I am really passionate about. I’ve got my dog, Link, and I have my daughter, who is disabled, has a service dog. I got into accessibility well before she was disabled, but now that we have her here, she lost her leg through some circumstances.
She’s a wheelchair user and has several other disabilities related to the things that have happened. I’ve been dealing a lot more with real world, the physical world, disability access barrier issues, and trying to make sure she’s going off to college that I want her to have access to be able to do all the things that she’s doing. This talk is going to actually allow us to talk about the real world, the physical world, not just the digital world. Other things I’m really excited about as we’re going into that. Speaking of Camp No Limits, I just want to take a moment and talk about that.
As I mentioned, my daughter lost her leg a little over three years ago about this time or so. Actually, no, it was actually close to the summer. After she had lost her leg, I was looking into a bunch of stuff and found out about camps for students, kids who had lost their limbs or were born with limb differences, and ended up finding Camp No Limits. That camp in particular really excited me because they had programming, not just for the student, for the camper, but also for the parents and for their siblings. My wife was able to go with my daughter and youngest son the first year, and then I was able to go with all of them the next year.
Then last year, my daughter had turned 18, so she went back as a volunteer and I went with her to volunteer. I’m looking forward to going again. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about all that stuff, it’s exciting and great program. Just look up Camp No Limits and it is the only one that I am aware of with that name. Moving on, I always like to talk about what we’re going to talk about before we talk about what we’re talking about. Today’s agenda, it’s what it says on the slide, we’re going to talk about first discovering personas, second, planning.
This is planning as it relates to personas, then design, then development, then testing, then content creation, and finally, access and barriers, and we’ll get to what I’m calling our playtime, where we’ll actually be going into and experimenting with this system, this tool that I am creating. Jumping ahead, the first thing we’re talking about is discovering personas, and ultimately, the idea here of personas is a tool or a way to understand the users that you have on your site. I just changed slides again. It still says discovering personas, and what it is is a tool to help understand real users.
It’s a way to create shorthand communication, not a replacement for user testing, especially with disabled users, and not complete understanding of real people. Personas are these ideas that have existed in marketing. They’ve existed in a little bit with sprint planning and things like that, where you create little notes about people that you’ve made up, and they are people that represent your users, people that represent your target audience, people that represent your potential customers or who you want your customers to be, and depending on how you’re using the tool, it really helps to define and do different things.
When we talk about personas in this context, we’re talking about users with disabilities, and we’re talking about how we can think through and talk about how those users are going to use the tools that we create, the products that we create, the environments that we create, the content that we create, all of these different things, and when we go through and talk about those different kinds of people that we’ve imagined around this, we can start to build a shorthand. If we have a user that is a low vision or blind user, and we’re creating a component, and we might say, ”Well, how does John use this? How are they going to interact with this?”
If we know who this is as a team as we’re talking this through, we can begin to really think through those ideas. At a really high level, that’s what the concept of a persona is. I do want to take a small second and talk about something that came up. I think it was last week. This is very recently that I got that. I believe in the chat, we will have a link dropped in for you for this first one. Heroku, it’s personas-prototype.herokuapp.com. On the screen, there is a very blurred-out image on the left. It’s almost impossible to read anything. I can see the word task at the top of this image.
It’s extremely hard to see, and that’s intentional. I’ll go into this for a second. Then it says, experience the web as personas with access needs. Then it has the link https://personas-prototype.herokuapp.com. Then we have the word caveats. A simulation is never a true representation of an impairment. It is only a tool trying to make some things roughly as difficult for someone without that impairment.
This is really important because as we talk about these ideas, personas, whether it’s using this tool that I’m going to show you in a second, whether it’s using access and barriers, whether it’s using any other kind of tool, these represent the idea of real people, but they are not real people. Even if I was able to somehow flip a switch and say, ”You are going to experience the life of a actual disabled person, and you’re going to fully understand that person’s reality,” that is one person, and disabled people are– quite frankly, they’re people.
They’re like everybody else. We’re all unique. We all have our own experiences, and so even if we understand one person’s disability, that doesn’t mean that we understand everybody’s disability. The best we can do here is say, ”This is a tool for helping to understand the ideas of what they’re going to experience as far as access barriers and how we can improve that experience.” I’m going to mention this more than once, by the way, because this is incredibly important as we talk about these ideas that we’re not giving you this, oh, now you understand everything there is to know about disability.
I’m going to actually bring up this website, and so this is experience the web as personas with access needs. The GDS accessibility team has created eight different accessibility personas. Each persona has a different access needs, and they are, and so I’m going to very briefly look at some of these. I’m not going to read every single thing on this page, though, but Claudia is a sight-impaired screen magnifier user. Ashleigh is a severely sight-impaired screen reader user. Ron is an older user with multiple conditions, and Chris is a user with rheumatoid arthritis, et cetera, et cetera.
If we click into one of these, for example, Claudia, we get a little more information about Claudia. My screen magnifier has made it possible for me to use the web again. I just wish more companies kept their websites simple. Then we get a little information about Claudia. She’s a 50-year-old social worker. She’s sight-impaired, partially sighted, and uses a screen magnifier and changes colors to increase contrast. Her frustrations are, tends to forget to scroll horizontally when the screen is magnified. Sometimes misses fields or help text when filling in forms that are next to each other.
Hates it when screen is magnified and a pop-up box appears off-screen. Gets confused if the layout form isn’t consistent. Then it lists her required assistive technology, the things that we will need to use this persona is actually what this is. None, complete the task as presented in the browser. The task, there’s three steps, is read the text on the following page, find out the total number of ministers, fill in the form on the same page, and submit your answer. When we click start task– and it’s going to blow up the screen really large. You’ll see as we scroll through, we’ve got to move around to try and read everything on this screen.
I’m not going to really spend any time to read this because I’m going to come down here and say, what’s the total number of ministers? I don’t know, three. How confident are you with your answer? Are you confident with your answer? There’s probably a field associated with this and I can’t find this, so I’m just going to click submit. Total number of ministers, three. Are you confident in your answer? Not selected because I couldn’t find the correct field for that. The point of that was to show what it’s like when you have your screen magnified and the content is organized.
It’s running way off on the side. It doesn’t really have structure about it to help you find what you’re looking for, and then the forms are kind of messed up. Then it asks you your thoughts. How did you find the task? I found it annoying. Did you have any difficulties completing it? Yes, I actually did. Did you answer both questions? No, I could not. How could the task be improved for accessibility? This is where you could really have a conversation about what that is. Then it has some improvements. Making small changes can have big impacts for some users.
We’ve made a number of changes to the previous task to make it more accessible. Try out the new improved version of the task. I’m going to click start that. We get up here and it’s still zoomed in a lot, but you’ll notice, okay, it’s got some bullet points. It’s got– Oh, this is nice. If I want to know the total number of ministers, if I scroll down here, I don’t have to move around at all. I can see now on the screen there’s one prime minister plus 20 cabinet members plus 97 other ministers for a total of 118 total ministers. That’s what I really wanted to know.
I can come in here and say 118, and, oh, this is much easier. It put it right in front of my face. I didn’t have to go searching around. Are you confident with your answer? Yes. Click submit. Based on that specific task, it made it significantly easier for us and it has some information on here. Split the page into sections with relevant headings. The format of the information was changed to improve readability and all content has been aligned to the left-hand side of the page. Did you find the information easier to find? Yes. Did you have any other difficulties completing the task?
If I wanted to know more information, maybe, but since the task was very specific, no, I did not have any other difficulties. How could the service be further improved for accessibility? That’s where we, again, can have a great conversation about all of that. I encourage you to use that link, go through those different personas and really begin to explore some of these ideas. Again, it’s not a perfect tool, but it is an interesting tool and a helpful tool. That is a lot in line with what I’m going to be talking about as we go forward. When we talk about personas related to planning, so personas in planning, we want to talk about some questions that we can ask. What does a feature do? It’s not just about what does a feature do, but what does a feature do related to our persona? How will these personas that we create use the feature? I gave that example earlier. Let’s say you have John who is low vision. How is John going to interact with this tool that we’re creating? What things do we need to think about for John? As we’re planning it out at the very beginning, I saw a great talk a while ago when it showed the expense of when we introduce accessibility into our process.
When you introduce it at planning, your expense is much lower to be accessible. If you introduce it at QA, your expense is like four times higher. It was a linear graph. They use the word exponential, but it went up very steeply in a nice straight line as it went through each stage of this. If you wait until the end to introduce it, it is going to be significantly more expensive. I think it’s actually 400 times. Anyways, that’s why people tend to not introduce accessibility because they wait a long time and they’re like, ”Oh, this is going to take so long to fix. We’ll worry about that after the initial release.”
Then it costs even more to fix. We put it into planning at this point and start saying, ”How will these personas– how will these people use the feature? What pitfalls might they experience?” We’ve created this tool that we’re going to have. It’s a form. How is John going to use this form on our website to submit? He’s maybe going to use a screen reader. What pitfalls might he experience? We need to make sure we use proper labels. We need to make sure that our instructions are marked up correctly, and we need to make sure that he’s able to correctly submit and interact with everything on this form.
The pitfalls he might experience is not knowing what a field is for. He might have a pitfall of, we’re going to introduce a honeypot to this form to try and cut down on spam. What’s that going to do to John? We’re going to introduce CAPTCHA then. We’re going to use reCAPTCHA. How is that going to affect John? What is that experience like for him? How can we mitigate those pitfalls? You see, we start very early in the process of asking about how the personas, the characters that we create are going to interact with the tools that we’re creating for them, the content we’re creating for them, whatever the experience is that we’re creating for them.
By putting it in at that point, we begin to build the story for our designer. We begin to build the story for our developer. We are able to create a much more clear picture of what this is supposed to be. When it reaches design, when it reaches development, things are going to be created better and more accessibly. It’ll also be a lot easier for your developer. As a developer, when I know what I’m making, I don’t have to spend a long period of time planning what I’m making before I can start making it. You can see how it’s a lot easier to start introducing some of these questions earlier than later.
Now, moving on, we’re going to be talking about personas in design. It’s a very similar concept. With personas in design, we’re going to be asking some questions. What should this persona understand most from the design? When we’re creating something, we saw just a little bit ago, the information that we were trying to see with that one Heroku app persona that we went through. If we design that and know that the information we’re really trying to share is who our ministers are, how many ministers there are, and how it’s aligned, we can begin to think through how we’re going to put that in front of them to make that information easy to get to.
If we’re talking about a persona that has dyslexia and we want to think about, well, we should avoid large blocks of text. We should focus a lot on bullet points. We should focus a lot on trying to organize and structure our information in a way that it’s easy to understand without jumping around between content. We talk about somebody whose persona is a dyscalculia. It’s like dyslexia but with numbers. We have a lot of data to present. We don’t want to use long strings of numbers. We don’t want to have a lot of information that’s hard to parse because you have to add up and calculate and understand the way the numbers are.
We should simplify and use visual representations that are easy to understand with numbers and proper markup to make sure that other people with other kinds of disabilities are able to interact with those ideas. What action do we want this persona to take? If they get to the page and our action is we want them to read it and understand the content, that’s one thing. If our action is we want them to click this link, then how are we going to make sure that they see that link? How are we going to make sure that they understand that that’s what we want them to do when they get to the end of this article, when they get to this page, whatever it is we’re doing?
I recently filled out a form and I am fully sighted. I do have glasses, but I can see the form. I interact using a mouse and a keyboard, so a little bit more of a traditional user. I went through this form and I get to the end of the form and I click submit. Then it throws an error and it says, ”Oh, you need to fill out this field, and this field, and this field.” I’m like, ”Okay, maybe you probably could have marked those fields as required in some way, shape, or form before I click submit.” There was no indication whatsoever that I needed to fill out those fields.
What action should this person take? They have to fill out these fields. Then we should make sure that’s clear visually and when we talk about development, using markup so that everybody knows that field is required. How can the design help them accomplish their goals? We need to understand why are they coming to this? What are their goals and how can we help them accomplish their goals? Then how can the design minimize potential negative experiences? Again, I showed that one view earlier where everything was really wide and it was very hard to find.
Then we saw how a little change in the layout or the design minimized the negative experience of having to scroll around, for example, that form filled the bottom looking for check yes or no. I had no idea where that was. I probably could have hunted around and eventually found it, but that was a very negative experience. Using some design to move that down directly underneath the label, make it very easy to find even when zoomed in significantly creates an extremely different experience. We talk about personas and development. Again, it’s a very similar concept.
How is this persona going to use the feature? We have to think through the mechanics. Are they going to be a keyboard user? Are they going to be a mouse and keyboard user? Are they interacting with this using a screen reader? Are they using a text-to-speech program? How are they interacting with and using the feature? What is their goal and what are they going to try to accomplish?
We need to make sure that as we build this out, that what they’re coming here to do, whether it’s their intended goal or whether it’s our intended goal for them, is something that they’re going to be able to understand when they’re interacting with the feature that we’re creating, when they’re interacting with the content or the app or whatever it is that we’re making for them, how will they know how to accomplish that? We’re going to have to explain that through the tools that we create. What tools and technology will they use with the feature and how can this be more intuitive with how they’re going to interact with it?
Saying those previous two from a different way of looking at it, and then can I use the feature the way they would? As we’re developing it, if we’ve thought through this idea of using a screen reader, and so we’re going to have a screen reader user come in and they’re going to use the tools in these particular ways we think about it, as I’m developing it, am I able to actually do the things that I said that they should be able to do? Then in testing, is just bringing all of that together. What tools are they going to use to interact with the feature?
Because when I’m testing, I need to use the same tools that they’re using. As a tester, I should be using a screen reader. I shouldn’t just be relying on, well, I activated WAVE, I activated aXe, I activated whatever, and it told me it passed. That’s not a pass. How can I simulate their experience with the same tools? We can’t always simulate everything, but there’s a ton of tools available. For example, we can activate aXe and turn on– Sorry, WAVE, and turn on some features around that, which will let us view different modes of color vision.
We can turn on some other tools to zoom in. We can use our screen readers. What things can we do to better simulate how they’re going to be actually using these tools? Then with content creation, and we’re just about at the end of this. Personas and content creation is how does this person read the content? This is one where we really need to start to begin to think through a lot of different ways that people think. This becomes highly intellectual because it’s not really a great tool to talk about somebody with dyslexia.
I had a great conversation just recently where somebody was complaining that a lot of simulators for dyslexia do some really weird stuff where they make the word just move big and move around and boom, boom, and all these other strange things. Most people with dyslexia don’t have that actual experience. It’s more like when you’re reading, how does this person read this content? What are they looking for in this content? How can I make it easier to find what they’re looking for with the tools they will use?
Words can jump around and your eye will move and make it seem like you’re reading, how can I make it, I’m making this mistake as I’m reading it, how can I make it easier? If you didn’t hear me, I had a little slip-up. How can it make it easier? Because I and it want to transpose when I’m looking at things. It does move around, but it doesn’t literally move around. When we try and simulate it, that’s what we have to do because it’s really hard to get in that headspace. We think through, how are they going to read this content?
As we begin to think through those ideas, it’s very helpful to start talking about, well, let’s make sure we have good structured headings. Let’s make sure we have bullet points and short paragraphs, not huge long blocks of text, because the bigger the blocks of text, the harder it is to parse and understand the information in there. What are they looking for in the content? What do I want them to understand in the content? How can I emphasize that? How can I pull that out and make that the easiest thing to find and understand?
How can I make it easier to find what they’re looking for with the tools they’re going to use? As we begin to talk through the ideas behind the way people think, we’ll start to write differently. What we’ll find is, as we write differently, it’s going to be more accessible, but it’s going to be better for SEO. It’s going to be easier for literally everyone to understand. The person that’s on their phone is going to have an easier time understanding the concept versus somebody that’s strictly on their computer, on a desktop. We make the stuff easier to write, easier to understand, easier to parse, more accessible, better SEO.
Ultimately, it’s going to make our content better for everybody. That was my really quick overview. I know I took a long time to do a really quick overview. We’re moving into phase two. I’m going to be talking about Access & Barriers. Access & Barriers is a tool that I am in the middle of creating. I’m introducing you. This is really the first public introduction that I’ve done to this. I am very excited, but also a little bit nervous. Access & Barriers is a tool to learn about disability and think through accessibility. It will cover important ideas, including dynamic and temporary disabilities.
I really want to highlight one of the things I try to do with this is talk about a lot of different ideas around disability because there’s so many things that people don’t think through. Dynamic and temporary disability is something that a lot of people really miss. They’re like, ”Oh, well, somebody is disabled or they aren’t disabled. Somebody is a wheelchair user or they aren’t a wheelchair user.” The reality is the majority of wheelchair users are ambulatory wheelchair users. They can walk for a little bit, but things change through their day and they may be able to walk.
Then a little bit later, they have to use their wheelchair. It’s dynamic. It changes. It grows. I know that this is– I’m using the words D&D, TTRPG, tabletop role-playing game. The word game is right there. I want to stress, this is not a game. Despite it being a tabletop role-playing game, TTRPG. This is about real people. We play D&D, we’re playing as dwarves, tieflings. We’re playing as these fantasy creatures. Maybe we’re playing as a human, but it’s not a real person, really. It’s an idea that’s fun and it doesn’t hurt anybody.
When we’re doing this, we represent real people and their lived experience. I can’t say that enough. I don’t want this to be like, ”Oh, this is a fun game.” I really would love this to be a fun thing to do, but it’s an educational tool. This does not replace lived experience or allow you to talk over disabled people. Ever. Listen to disabled people. I want to be extremely clear on this. If you full on 100% go in on this, come up with a whole bunch of personas, a whole bunch of characters for this, you really go in during your planning phase, your design phase, your development phase, your testing phase, every part of this is completely immersed and I would love that.
You think you’ve really thought through it all and then a disabled person contacts you and you say, ”I can’t do this. This is not working for me.” You don’t say, ”Well, we did all of this to prove that it’s going to work and everything tests out fine and it passes everything that we’ve done.” No, listen to disabled people. I said it once, I’m going to say it again, even if I could perfectly give you the experience of a disabled person’s life and you fully and completely understand that experience, even if you yourself are disabled and therefore fully understand your own personal experience, disabled people respond differently, know differently, have different lived experiences.
Therefore, they’re going to have different interactive experiences with the things that we create. We need to remember, no matter how hard we try, if someone comes in and says, ”This isn’t working,” we can do better. It doesn’t mean you failed. It means you have an opportunity to learn more. I hope that’s been really, really understand. We’re going to share another URL with you in the chat. I’m going to invite you to go to this URL. It’s on the screen, tinyurl.com/access- dash-barriers. This should take you to a Dropbox folder. I’m going to try and share some of the content in there.
I do ask as you look in there, the first thing that you will see is a rules PDF at the top level of the folder. That’s this right here. I’m not going to read through all this. I am going to talk about a lot of the things in here. If you notice here, I am going to highlight this again. On the screen, we have now my rules that I’m starting to put together. Access and barriers, an accessibility T– Oh, that should be TTRPG. I’ve got a typo I’ve got to fix. Welcome to a better world, a world where everyone is worthy of access and no one is left out. This is something I really want to emphasize.
This fantasy world may seem far less believable than one involving wizards, elves, and dragons, but you can help make it a reality by playing this game. Again, I want to highlight, I use the word game because it’s modeled on the idea of a game, but it’s not. There’s some things you need to understand. I really want to highlight these. You will not earn the right to speak over disabled people. You will not walk a mile in their shoes. You will not understand all there is to know about a disabled person or the struggles they face due to inaccessibility.
I can’t stress that enough, but you will learn about disability, including disability spectrums, dynamic disabilities, invisible disabilities, and temporary disabilities. You will learn about tools and technologies that can improve access for disabled people, and you will start thinking about accessibility and lowering or even removing barriers to access, and you will become a better ally. I have in that folder also example profiles, and there’s five example– Yes, there’s also comorbidity of disabilities. Thank you, Ren. Comorbidity is when people have multiple disabilities.
A great example of that is my daughter who I mentioned. She had a heart attack, and as a result of the heart attack, got anoxic brain injuries. That means blood was not getting to her– or oxygenated blood was not getting to her brain, and parts of her brain suffered as a result of that, resulting in a whole host of things. She lost her left leg, so she is an amputee. She has ongoing disabilities related to between the medication she had, the heart condition, and other things going on with that.
It’s similar to POTS, where she stands up, she gets faint, and her heart rate does not accelerate, though, which is different from POTS, but her blood pressure goes extremely low, really scary, extremely low, and a bunch of other things, and I can go on and on. We joke as a family, whenever we had to fill out medical questionnaires and stuff like that, it would be easier to list the things she does not have than to check all the things that she does have. Disabilities interact with each other, and as it causes the dynamic concept of disabilities, they can cause one of them to inflame another one, and it’s just a whole host of things to go with that, and so that is a big part of one of the things we’re talking about.
If you look in the example profiles, I definitely invite you to open all of these up. If you’re thinking, maybe I would be interested in participating with this here in a moment, definitely open up these character profiles. I’m going to open a couple of them. The first one I have is Billy. Billy is a colorblind retiree. He worked in banking until he retired and enjoys spending time with grandchildren while exploring new hobbies. At the top of the next section in his bio, we have spoons and then frustration, and so we’re not talking about hit points, but spoons is an interesting concept when we talk about disability.
Not everybody understands spoon theory, so real quickly, spoon theory is this idea that let’s say everybody has a certain number of spoons through the day. Some people might have 10 spoons. Other people might have 1,000 spoons, and whenever you do an action, it might cost you 1 spoon or it might cost you 3 spoons. It varies from person to person on how that works. The way that I wrote this out, we have a max number, so Billy started off with 100 spoons and a min number, so when he drops down to 10 or fewer spoons, it starts inflaming other disabilities, so this is that concept of dynamic disability.
When somebody runs down to zero spoons, they can do literally nothing more. They’re done. I talk to people and they talk about their spoons, and they’re like, ”Well, I was walking up the steps, and I ran out of spoons, and I had to just sit down on the steps. That was it. I was done. I could not take another step. I couldn’t make it to my bed. I couldn’t go anywhere else. I sat on the steps, and that’s where I camped out for the rest of the day,” which is a little terrifying to think of. You’re just going to be stuck on the steps, that’s the reality for people that go through this kind of experience.
The other side of this is frustration, and I recognize that not everybody really fully goes through spoons, but frustration is another concept to measure this, and so in his case, his minimum is zero, so he starts off with zero frustration. His maximum is 100. When his frustration goes over 100, then he can start running into additional complications with his disabilities and possibly experience new disabilities that he was not disabled from before but becomes disabled from later. Frustration is a measurement of when things are not working well.
You can’t do the thing that you want to do, and so you don’t really necessarily burn a spoon to do it because you can’t do the thing. Your frustration index goes up. When you’ve had a long rest, those things reset. The next section is well-being, and so these are the seven dimensions of well-being. There’s some great articles out there on this, but there’s not a concept of leveling up, but one of our goals would be to overall improve the well-being of the characters that we have, and so social would be your social interaction.
He has five out of seven, so ideally, through the experiences that he has, maybe he would develop a new friend or improve his relationship with his friend group, and that would move his social well-being up. Physical is your physical state, your physical being, and so that might be he gets sick because he has to wait out in the cold or something like that, and so now his physical goes down as a result of that. We would want that generally to go up or at least remain the same through his interactions or experiences.
Financial is our financial status, so if he loses his retirement, his financial would go down significantly. Emotional is this concept of how you feel. Environmental is your housing situation, your vehicle situation. Some of that is tied into your financial situation, but it is the environment you have. Is your house clean or are you completely burned out to the point that you can’t clean up after dinner, and so now you’ve got burn moving in? That would be a reduction environment, but it would probably also result in a reduction of physical, a reduction in social, a reduction in emotional, and then a reduction in emotional or even spiritual.
These things are all interconnected as a way. One symbol I saw was really cool. It’s like the Olympic rings where they’re all interconnected around each other. Mental is a mental well-being, so it’s tied similarly to emotional, but it is your mental state, and then spiritual would be how you feel spiritually as a result of things, and so different people respond to these differently. I want to have all these. The next section down is sensory or is our stat block, so we have sensory, physical, cognitive, mental health, and physical health. They have your base stat and then a modifier, so in his case, sensory is a 10 with a minus 3.
His physical is 10 with a plus 1. His cognitive is 12 with a plus 1. His mental health is 10 plus 0, and his physical health is 10 plus 0. Physical is a representation of the body itself, where physical health would be talking about things like chronic illness or even short-term illness. If he got sick, he would take a temporary modifier to his physical health. Then we have a section for his backstory. I’m just going to read his quickly. Billy was born red/green colorblind but didn’t realize until kindergarten when he could not complete classwork involving color.
He did well in other schoolwork, though. After graduating, Billy went on to college, married his high school sweetheart, and got into banking. He worked the next 40 years and retired comfortably. Billy is exploring hobbies and other interests as he tried to figure out what to do with his free time. This means he spends a good bit of time online researching his latest interests. Just helpful to have a little information. We would record some backstory about Billy. Finally, or on the next page, rather, we have our stat block, which is broken up. You’ll notice it follows the stat block from the previous one.
In his case, he has sensory, which includes vision, color perception, hearing, and sensory processing. We have starting from negative five all the way up to five, including zero. Anything from zero up to five would be considered not disabled. For somebody that has dynamic disabilities where they’re not disabled all the time, we would mark them as zero because then they rather regularly become disabled as a result of things that happen. Three would be roughly average for most people. We think through vision of one would be, you have to wear a pretty strong prescription.
Vision of two, you have a mild prescription. Vision of three, you don’t need glasses, so I would also be a two because I have a mild prescription. Vision of four, you can see better than average, and vision of five, you can see quite a bit better than average, almost superhuman level of vision. We can understand those ideas related to hearing. He has a vision of two, a hearing of two. His color perception is negative three. He is disabled related to color perception, so we’re going to go below zero. He is completely red/green colorblind.
Sensory processing, he has a three, so he’s average on sensory processing. Personally, I would have a sensory processing of negative one because I do have a sensory processing disorder. If a character has a negative five, so if we look at Meg’s sheet, she has negative five on her left leg. That would mean she has zero ability to use her left leg. In her case, she has zero left leg. Since there is no left leg, she cannot use the left leg. If we were to talk about rolling or things like that, if somebody had a three on their left leg, they would have to maybe wear an AFO.
They would have loss of some functionality, but they could potentially walk using their left leg. If they roll well, if they do well, you could talk through these ideas of what can they and can’t they do, but if they have negative five, they have no ability to use their left leg. Now, in Meg’s case, she could put on a prosthetic and raise that up to negative thee or negative two, so it’s dynamic and it can move around. I’m going to go through this fairly quickly, so I’m not going to dig into all of the rest of these because in his case, he does not have any other disabilities that I want to highlight.
The next page is a record of the actual disabilities, and it can include descriptions. In his case, he has sensory disabilities, red, green, colorblind, and then as we get down to chronic health disabilities, he does have mild arthritis. The next page after that is tools and technologies, and so we record the tools that he has available to him. He uses a cell phone. He uses a computer. He’s not really using anything specific to related disabilities, so I didn’t record any of that, but there’s a section to record notes about those particular tools.
If we open up some of our other ones, I think Chris is a good example. No, not Chris. It was Jerry that I wanted. Wait, no, actually, I did want Chris. Sorry. If I scroll through, Chris is a quadriplegic, and so we get down to his computer. He uses eye controls, voice detects, and voice assistant on his computer, and with his power wheelchair, he uses mouth controls to be able to move it, so we can make notes about how they interact with and use their different technologies that they have.
The last page is notes. It’s just open-ended to be able to record information about different scenarios that they go through and the way things affected and other information that we would want to keep track of, so I don’t have anything in my notes currently on my example sheets. That is a very quick and rough run-through of these particular characters. The next thing that we would have that we would talk through are scenarios. I haven’t gotten into campaign planning. Campaigns would be a larger experience of doing more than one specific thing, so a scenario is a very specific thing that you would do, and a campaign would be a larger concept.
I don’t want this on the screen right now. On the scenarios, I would like to see if I can get a volunteer from Amber, and I’m going to assign you, Amber.
>> AMBER: Great. I’m a volunteer.
>> NICK: Yes, please. She volunteered earlier and said that she would really like to do this. I did not volunteer her. Told me she would really like to do this and was excited about this.
>> AMBER: I am excited about this, and I’m willing to volunteer to show other people in just a little bit how fun it is.
>> NICK: All right. Amber, I am going to assign you Meg. If you want to open up her profile, and I’m going to review this very quickly for everybody. Meg is a teen girl with multiple disabilities, so that idea of comorbidity. I told you this includes it. Multiple disabilities, including amputation, brain injuries, heart disease, and more. She’s a student and primarily wheelchair user. She is also my daughter, so this is why I started with this character because I know the most about this character. It is somebody I actually know.
>> AMBER: Hopefully, I can do her justice.
>> NICK: You will do great. I trust you. Meg is a spoonie. That means she has low spoons. She only has 20 spoons at the start of every day, and once she goes below 10 spoons, she will start experiencing problems. I can tell you from firsthand knowledge, her vision starts to get worse. She gets sensory overload. It just really wears on her. She gets completely worn out, and it gets progressively worse as things go. If we get Meg down below 10, we have to recognize it’s going to trigger a lot of other things, and it’s going to make Meg very miserable, and it will lower her emotional and mental well-being.
It is not a great experience, so let’s not do that to poor Meg. Starting off, Meg is very social. She has six out of seven. Meg is not so great physically. She does have a lot going on, and so she is at four out of seven, pretty much middle of the road. She has room to get better, room to get worse. Financially, she is in a similar place at four out of seven. Emotionally, she is in a similar place at four out of seven. Environmentally, she has a great environment, I hope. I like to think she does, so she’s up at six out of seven.
Mentally, she is surprisingly well at five out of seven, and spiritually, also surprisingly well at six out of seven. Her sensory starts off at 10 with a negative 1 modifier. Her physical, on the other hand, is at five with a negative four modifier, which is pretty significant. We’ll look at that in a moment. Cognitive, she is at 10 with a plus 2 modifier. Mental health is at eight with a minus one modifier, and her physical health is at eight with a minus three modifier. I’ve given you her backstory, so I’m going to scroll through that and look at her stats. Her vision is currently plus two.
I have mentioned she has some injuries to her brain affecting her occipital lobe, which is where vision takes place, and as she gets below, her vision will quickly drop down to negative one when she uses too many spoons. Color perception, she’s three, very average. Sensory processing, she starts off at zero. I mentioned that’s where our real dynamic disabilities would typically start. Very easily, she’s going to be overloaded for sensory. Her hearing is excellent, even though sometimes she doesn’t listen. Her left arm is average. Her right arm is average. Her right leg has some disability with it.
It’s not actually disabled, but it can become wore out very quickly, and so it would start at zero and then move down from there. And her left leg is non-existent unless she puts on a prosthetic, so it’s negative five. Her cognitive is with ADHD, negative one. Comprehension is still average at three. Depression is not terrible at two. Anxiety is– she has generalized anxiety disorder, so she has negative two on anxiety. Her physical health, she starts off fatigue at negative two because of all the stuff that she deals with constantly all day long.
It’s very wearing. She has phantom limb pain and a bunch of other things we can talk through. She has a negative three on pain already off the bat. There’s always pain. It is a constant level of pain that just gets worse. We can look through her disabilities. Sensory, she has inconsistent low vision. Normally she can see well, but it gets blurry randomly and also with use. Sensory processing disorder, we talked about. Physical disabilities is amputation, hip level, left leg. Lessened motor control in general.
It’s gotten better, but she definitely has some issues with even like her hands or anything like that, and a weakened right leg. Cognitive and intellectual disability. She has ADHD and autism level one. We can talk about that idea later if we really want to, but there’s lots of different ways that autism has been measured through the years. That’s one that I particularly am using because it’s a more modern way that they’re talking about it. Generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD, as you can imagine from everything.
Chronic health disabilities, congenital heart defect, which is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, phantom limb pain, and skeletal muscular pain. Lots of stuff. On her mobile phone, she has a little bit of magnification. It’s not huge, but some. Screen reader that she uses at times whenever she needs to. On her laptop, she does the same thing. Some magnification and a screen reader. She has a manual wheelchair and a prosthetic, which I could write more about all these. I just did not. She has crutches. She has an AFO.
She always has her headphones to deal with overwhelming noise. I wanted to put that in there to highlight that. That’s something that works great for her. Always has the over-the-ear headphones, and it just really helps her life. That is who Meg is. Do you feel like you have enough information to think through how Meg might interact with the scenario?
>> AMBER: Yes, let’s do it.
>> NICK: All right, let’s do it. A scenario has four parts to it. There’s the task. There’s the description. There’s the barriers, which I’m not going to tell you about, and then there’s the reward. The barriers will be something you get to discover. It’s fun. The first task that we’re going to talk about is, that is not–
>> AMBER: Am I supposed to look at this or don’t look at it?
>> NICK: Don’t look at that because I don’t [crosstalk]
>> AMBER: The scenario. Okay. I will not open it.
>> NICK: I accidentally opened the wrong one first. Okay, so the first one is check the mail. In this scenario, Meg has moved away from home and she found a nice third-floor apartment. I’m sure you can understand the potential problems of the third-floor apartment, but you get what you get. Now Meg knows that there is a check that is coming in the mail today, and so she needs to go down to the first floor where the mail will come in, and she needs to check her mail, and then return to her apartment.
The reward is pretty simple. The mail includes a critical check required to pay the rent this month. Meg, you’re in your apartment. You’re sitting in your nice comfy wheelchair. You know the tools that you have available to you. What would you like to do, Meg?
>> AMBER: I think that I would initially probably just take my wheelchair to the elevator. I’m assuming that– Is the door– Here’s a question. Does my apartment have a– Is it easy for me to open the door with a push button? Or do I have to maneuver and open the door manually?
>> NICK: That is a great question, and unfortunately, like most apartments, it doesn’t have an automatic door opener. So you are going to have to maneuver around that door.
>> AMBER: That is something that I learned from my friend Michelle Frechette, who actually wrote something about WordCamp US a couple of years ago. She wrote publicly about her experience getting trapped in a bathroom there. My assumption is it might be easier to open the door standing, and so I might want to put my prosthetic on, stand, open the door, push the wheelchair out, then sit in the wheelchair. I don’t know, depending on how difficult it is to open the door.
>> NICK: That’s not a bad plan if that’s what you would like to do. I am going to go ahead and let you do that.
>> AMBER: Then I think–
>> NICK: You put on the prosthetic, you open the door, you step out, you get in your wheelchair, you take your prosthetic off, you get in the wheelchair, or are you going to leave the prosthetic on?
>> AMBER: Is it cheating that I followed you and I know that the prosthetic can be very uncomfortable? [laughs] I think I would leave it on just in case I needed it later.
>> NICK: That’s fine. Just to point out, you’ve used two spoons to do all that.
>> AMBER: Okay. and I’ve only got 10.
>> NICK: I believe it’s 18 spoons.
>> AMBER: Oh, yes. I’ve only got 20.
>> NICK: You’re outside. You’ve got your door.
>> AMBER: So then I think I go to the elevator and I push the button.
>> NICK: You’ve used another spoon to do that, and you push the button. You’re waiting.
>> AMBER: I get on the elevator and I ride it down.
>> NICK: No, the elevator hasn’t come yet. You’re waiting.
>> AMBER: Oh, okay. I’m waiting. [laughs]
>> NICK: You’re waiting for the elevator?
>> AMBER: Yes.
>> NICK: All right. You’re waiting. You’re still waiting. Your frustration has gone up now.
>> AMBER: Because it hasn’t come yet.
>> NICK: Because you’re waiting. You’re still waiting. You continue to wait.
>> AMBER: It does get frustrating, doesn’t it?
>> NICK: Your frustration has continued to go up. Let’s go up and look at your frustration stat real quick.
>> AMBER: Does my elevator tell me what floor it’s on? [crosstalk] Can I tell that it’s on the way? Does it have one of the dials?
>> NICK: You want to go look and see. No, the numbers aren’t changing at all. The numbers aren’t even lit up.
>> AMBER: Then I suppose if I waited that long and I wasn’t seeing the numbers changing, then I might use my phone to call if there’s someone like a super or someone, I guess.
>> NICK: You make a phone call. The supervisor answers after a good long while. What do you want, Meg?
>> AMBER: I don’t think the elevator is working. I’m stuck on the third floor.
>> NICK: Yes, someone told me the elevator is not working today. We’ll look at it later.
>> AMBER: Will you check my mail for me and bring it up?
>> NICK: I’m real busy right now. I could probably get to that later. I don’t know. Is it important? There’s a lot going on. I don’t have time to deal with everybody all the time. Can you just come on downstairs and check the mail? It’s not a big deal. Bye. Click.
>> AMBER: Now I’d be really mad.
>> NICK: Yes, your frustration is up to at least 50, 55, 60. That took a lot out of you. You used another couple of spoons. You’re down to like 15 on your spoons, too. That really burns you pretty bad. The elevator’s out. Super’s not going to help you. He doesn’t see a point in helping you. You should be able to help yourself. He doesn’t understand.
>> AMBER: I think at this point, that’s a good question, what would I do? I don’t know that I would attempt the stairs because I’m not certain that I could go down three flights of stairs and then also come back up them.
>> NICK: I think that is a very accurate assumption for Meg. She would not make that trip very easily.
>> AMBER: I’m assuming if I were going to do it more safely, I’d actually be sitting and going down them.
>> NICK: Yes. That’s called bumping. I can tell you for a fact, Meg would do that. She did that today.
>> AMBER: Yes, but I don’t know about three flights up and down.
>> NICK: That would be a lot.
>> AMBER: I guess I might give up depending on if I actually need to check right now or if I can wait until later because I’m assuming, like they’re not allowed to let the elevator stay broken. [laughs]
>> NICK: You would love to think that.
>> AMBER: I don’t actually know, right?
>> NICK: That’s not reality, but you’d love to think that.
>> AMBER: No, you couldn’t like call the fire marshal and be like, “My elevator is broken in my apartment.”
>> NICK: I know some disabled people that have run into this problem and they’ve had to deal with days of outages. It’s not a great experience. It’s really frustrating.
>> AMBER: So then I think I would probably give up and try again later. Then if it still didn’t work, I would probably at that point ask a neighbor if I’m friends with my neighbors or call a typically abled friend or relative and ask them if they could come get my mail for me.
>> NICK: I think we learned a lot, and this is an unfortunate reality for a lot of disabled people. I think the solutions you came up with were wonderful because I feel like, first off, those are great ideas to start with, calling the super saying, “Why is this elevator not going?” making some plans of, “I’m going to have my leg with me in case I need it at another point.” A lot of great things you thought through. I especially love at the end, “If I’m friends with somebody else in the building.”
This is something that a lot of disabled people, part of what we would do with access and barriers is our afteraction. This is this conversation we’re having right now. What could make this a better experience? A better experience might be intentionally for somebody who has a disability to become friends with other people that can help them that are nearby. That’s also very wearing on people with disabilities. They don’t want to always feel like they’re a burden to everything.
Another idea for all of us is, are there people around us with disabilities that I need to be there for? Proactively be there for. Wouldn’t it be really amazing if maybe Meg had a relationship that had been established and that person checked on her and just called on a regular basis, “What can I do for you?”
>> AMBER: Or just like the neighbor next door is just always like, ‘Hey, do you want me to always get your mail when I’m getting my mail?” That kind of thing.
>> NICK: Exactly. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. There’s a lot of really great ideas that we can explore around this. I see people are starting to need to leave, and so I want to go ahead and move on. I could go through a couple other scenarios, but I’d really love to get to a night out. I wish this would stop trying to open over there because I have surprises.
>> AMBER: [laughs] Does anybody want to volunteer and come on and do a scenario with Nick? If you do and you want to raise your hand in the Zoom feature, I can promote you to come on. Let’s see if we have any brave.
>> NICK: While we wait, and I promise this is really easy. You watched Amber do this. This is not a hard thing to do. But while we wait, I want to read through our scenario. Our task slash objective is to enjoy a night out with friends. Our description is the characters, two or more. Ideally, we’d have at least one other person. I do know that we asked Paola earlier if she would volunteer if nobody else is volunteering, but we can have up to five total participants. If Amber and Paola are there, then we can have a total of three additional participants.
Two or more characters want to enjoy a night out. They are going to go out to dinner. Then they’re going to go to the movies or a show. We’ll let you decide, and then maybe stop for a nightcap/dessert if they have the energy. There’s still spoons remaining. There’s some things you may run into through the course of the evening. The reward for this is spending time with friends, improve social standing. That is, our social level will move up. There are also documented health benefits to strong social structures.
We’ve talked through just in this scenario the advantages of having a good strong social group with you when you are disabled and potentially run into encounters. I will say that I do have, for example, online test is one of my example scenarios. Take an online test and take a remote learning course. It’s time to take their first test. The what barriers is, there’s a timer running in the top corner that’s going to cause your anxiety to go up. It’s going to cause other frustrations, things to think through with all of that. You cannot turn that off.
There is a virtual proctor watching you via the webcam, which means if you get up to go to the bathroom, if you get up for any reason whatsoever, you will fail. Which is very anxiety-inducing, but also can be a reality for certain disabilities that can be a major blocker for you. If you have IBS, even, imagine having an emergency like that and then having to reach out to the instructor to explain why you had to get up from the chair as you were being remotely monitored and ask them to please, please, please reset your test.
The reward is you want to do well in class, and if you do, you’re going to continue the education. If not, you may consider quitting. There’s a lot of examples in here that are related to technology, digital spaces, but I also have examples in here that are related to physical spaces because I wanted to explore those ideas. We got any other volunteers that would like to play any of our other characters?
>> AMBER: Would anyone be interested? Under the reaction, you can raise your hand and I can promote you. I haven’t seen any yet. [crosstalk] I could just do it. Let me add a spotlight for Paola so she’s on. Can I pick on? Let’s see, who can I pick on? Ricky, would you want to? Oh, Maureen volunteered. All right. We’re going to see how this goes. I’m going to promote you to a panelist, Maureen. I think that means she’s going to show up. You should be able to turn on your camera and talk now, Maureen.
>> MAUREEN: All right. Can you see and hear me?
>> NICK: Yes.
>> AMBER: Yes. Thank you for being a brave volunteer.
>> MAUREEN: It’s fun.
>> NICK: I do have a few– Let me bring this over here. See if I can make things larger.
>> AMBER: Do you want us to each just pick a character we’re going to be from your list of characters?
>> NICK: Yes, please. If you’ve had time to review, you may know, but let’s see. Billy, we know, is our colorblind retiree. Chris is a quadriplegic celebrity. You may be familiar with his work.
>> AMBER: As Superman?
>> NICK: Yes. [laughter] Jerry is a stay-at-home dad. This is an interesting character because Jerry is not traditionally disabled, however. You’ll see his disabilities. He does have a mild sensory processing disorder. His focus is very low, but it is an attributed reason. He gets overloaded from stress with long days of active children. He has temporary disabilities. For example, he might be holding a baby in his left arm and therefore not be able to use his left arm. He can also become distracted by his children.
Disability is not always this idea that is straightforward like we think about, but it can affect a lot of different people in temporary ways, and when we talk about–
>> AMBER: I’m just being a little bit mindful of time. Do you want us to just pick one and we can go through a scenario?
>> NICK: Yes, please. I just wanted to give a quick overview if you haven’t seen some of them, but let’s see. Kate is the last one we’ve not really looked at. She’s just a young woman with dyscalculia. She is looking into going into school at this point, but she’s not started, so that test-taking one is actually really important for her. She’s starting to make new friends through school. I have a typo I’ve got to fix.
>> AMBER: Paola, Maureen, do any of them jump out to you that you want to role-play?
>> PAOLA: I can take Jerry.
>> NICK: Okay, Jerry. All right. Jerry is our stay-at-home dad.
>> AMBER: Maureen, who do you want to be?
>> MAUREEN: I’ll try Kate, although I don’t really know much about the disability.
>> NICK: Basically, dyscalculia, it basically means she’s really, does not do well with numbers. It’s sort of like dyslexia. One way I’ve heard it described is like, numbers are like a foreign language you don’t know. It just does not make a lot of sense. We’ll walk through some of those things as we go through them.
>> AMBER: I’ll be Chris this time.
>> NICK: You’re going to be Chris this time. Okay, great. Chris is our well-loved public figure who experienced spinal cord injury and complete paralysis. We’re going to start off the evening. Each of you are at your own place and you are planning to go out tonight. First thing you’ll need to do is– we’ll see what’s going on. Since you’ve already got a little experience, let’s start. Chris, so Amber, the goal is to enjoy a night out with your friends. Your two friends are Kate and Jerry. What do you think you’d like to start by doing?
>> AMBER: I think I would call them or call one of them. I think it’s probably faster for me to call someone than to text them, possibly.
>> NICK: All right. You’re going to give a phone call. Who are you calling first?
>> AMBER: I’ll call Jerry and ask him if he wants to get together with Kate and some other friends and go out for dinner.
>> NICK: All right. Sounds great. Paola, you get a phone call. It’s Chris on the line.
>> PAOLA: I put one of the kits down and grabbed my phone.
[laughter]
>> NICK: Good, good, good. Thank you for thinking through that.
>> PAOLA: I say hi to Chris.
>> NICK: All right. So you’re talking to Chris. You happen to notice that one of your twins is starting to grab a fork and head towards a light socket, by the way.
>> PAOLA: I dropped the phone. I yelled, “Hold on a second,” to the phone while I go grab the kid.
>> NICK: All right. Now you’ve got a kid. You’ve saved their life. Back on the phone.
>> AMBER: Chris is going to say, “Jerry, you really ought to put those plastic plug things in your outlet.”
>> NICK: That is some great advice.
>> PAOLA: Good advice, yes.
>> AMBER: I think I would ask Jerry if he would be up for messaging the whole group and planning it and then text me back or something.
>> PAOLA: Would you mind giving me a few minutes to sort out the kid and then text them so that we can make up the plans?
>> NICK: Good, good, good. All right. I’m going to fast-forward a little bit. Normally we would spend some time with this, but you’re doing a great job thinking through what Jerry’s situation is. I think it’s really important. I think, Amber, you’re doing a great job realizing the limitations that Chris has with being able to actively plan certain things. If you read through his bio, by the way, Chris does have workers with him to help out with a lot of stuff. That’s something you may want to consider leaning into. Maureen, we’re going to bring you up to speed.
You are all aware of what you’re going to do. You’re going to go out for dinner and you’re going to meet at the restaurant. Let’s get everybody to the restaurant. I think at this point, we can trust that Jerry’s wife is going to take good care of the kids after she gets off of work. He’s going to have a little difficulty getting to the restaurant. I’m curious, Amber, how is Chris going to get to the restaurant?
>> AMBER: I’m assuming Chris is going to have a caregiver take him to the restaurant in his handicapped van.
>> NICK: Okay, that sounds like a good plan. Then Maureen, Kate is not going to have any trouble getting to the restaurant. You all arrive at the venue. You meet up outside the venue and you’re ready to go check in at the restaurant.
>> AMBER: Here’s what I would assume. I would assume, and this could be wrong, that we would go to restaurants that Chris had been to already and knew were accessible, and or they might have Superman memorabilia everywhere and be super excited to accommodate Chris. That’s my assumption. Although I do see in Chris’s bio that he travels all over, which means he might sometimes encounter unexpected difficulties, like perhaps without realizing there aren’t curb cuts or something.
>> NICK: That’s it.
>> AMBER: My assumption is we picked a restaurant we know because we’re in our hometown.
>> NICK: Okay, so you picked a restaurant you know. It’s got a ramp.
>> PAOLA: I was going to say I approach the hostess and let them know that we have a reservation because I assume Chris, as the celebrity that he is, he made a reservation.
>> NICK: All right, so she’s got your table ready, you just need to come on in.
>> PAOLA: We walk into our table following our hostess.
>> NICK: All right, so I guess it’s fair to say that Jerry and Kate walk on up.
>> AMBER: Chris uses his breathing tools, I totally forgot what it is, to control his wheelchair or potentially has a caregiver with him to help with either pushing the chair or any other needs that might arise during the move.
>> NICK: All right, where is he going?
>> AMBER: He’s going to follow them.
>> NICK: He cannot go up the steps. That’s not happening.
>> AMBER: This restaurant has stairs. He’s going to go around to the side door, which has a ramp.
>> NICK: There’s a ramp, okay. He’s going up the ramp, he makes it up to the first turn, and there at the turn that heads back to the entrance of the restaurant, there is a planter that has been put there. Large planter blocking half the ramp, and he cannot get past it.
>> MAUREEN: Did we go with him to his entrance?
>> NICK: You decided that you were going to go with him?
>> MAUREEN: Yes, of course.
>> NICK: Jerry went to check the table, you went with Chris and his caregiver.
>> MAUREEN: Yes.
>> NICK: All right, that sounds great. You’re there with Chris and the caregiver, and there is a large planter. Weighs about 200 pounds. Kate is not a large person, young woman. There’s a 200-pound planter in your way, in Chris’s way.
>> MAUREEN: I will walk back to the front entrance and tell them that the planter’s in the way.
>> NICK: I’m going to be nice and move things along. They get a bunch of folks from the back of the restaurant. They come out, they drag this planter down out of the way, and you’re able to enter and enjoy a nice dinner. Nobody has any gluten or treated allergies in the group, so our next barrier is not going to be an issue. I will say this, the bill has now arrived, and it’s time to figure out who owes what and how the tip works. Again, I’m moving things along rather quickly, but this would be a point where Kate is going to encounter some issues and is not going to understand how she’s going to divvy up the bill.
She’s going to have to rely on her friends to do some stuff. Does she trust them well enough? No, she’s not getting stiff. Does she know that they are going to divide up all these things, and they’re nice people? We’re going to move things along, but this is a conversation that we would have if we were running this full scenario about stuff and how this makes Kate feel as a person.
>> MAUREEN: She could also have thought ahead to this because she’s encountered it before and in the beginning, asked the waiter to make her own– divide it up so that everybody’s paying for their own meal.
>> NICK: The only thing she needs to do then is figure out tip because we live in America and we don’t take care of people with a living wage. We have to give them a tip so that they can afford to pay their rent and stuff, which is lovely, but we won’t get into that. How are you going to figure out your tip situation?
>> MAUREEN: I will have to ask.
>> NICK: You’re going to ask. Okay. There are apps. There are other things that can be used. Those are some stuff to think through with this character. There’s also some really interesting things that a lot of restaurants have started doing and that is putting that information right on there, which feels a little bit like app, but also it is an accessibility feature for people who experience this calculator and do not like to figure that out. That is a option as well. Again, see, we’re talking through all the accessibility and barriers and ways that those things can be done.
Now it is time to go to the theater. I’m not going to bore you too much because it does not strictly affect any of our characters, but if you had a character who was low vision or deaf, the theater does not have descriptive audio devices. I pulled that from a conversation I had with somebody on Threads a few weeks ago where their daughter was low vision. They went to watch Moana 2 and they’ve been really getting into watching Moana and they had descriptive audio available to her daughter and then they got into the theater and they did not have the device enabled for that.
That was a very frustrating experience for her as a parent. The theater’s closed caption devices stopped working part of the way through the movie is our other barrier. Again, we don’t have anybody that is deaf or hard of hearing that is using closed captioning in the group, but this is a real experience that I know affects a lot of people because on the regular, these caption devices stop working. They wear them around their neck and it has a screen that has the captions on them right in front of you and then they stop working.
Again, in the interest of time, I’m going to fast forward and we’ve talked through some of these barriers and things that have happened. What else could have been done for the planter that was our major barrier that we ran into? By the way, Maureen, I really liked that you planned on having your character go with Chris. I think that’s incredibly important because it meant that he didn’t have to wait by himself while his caregiver went or to loop all the way back around. That was excellent thinking on your part. That was a great move.
The answer I will give you is the restaurant should never block the ramp. That happens everywhere. I have encountered that with my daughter where we’ve had to bypass and go around these stupid planters or trash cans on the regular basis. It is incredibly frustrating. Do we have any questions from the group? By the way, thank you, Maureen. Thank you, Paola.
>> AMBER: I’ll let you go off-camera here, Maureen. Thank you so much for being a brave volunteer and being willing to come on for everyone.
>> MAUREEN: It was fun.
>> PAOLA: It was fun.
>> MAUREEN: Thank you.
>> AMBER: I don’t see any questions. And I do know we have only about five minutes left with our captioner. I’m wondering if you want to give us a quick recap or like high-level some thoughts on where you’re going with some of this, if you’re going to be building out more of these character sheets or recommendations if someone wants to take some of these scenarios into their workplace or what would you recommend for people, Nick?
>> NICK: Yes, absolutely. Again, I have the link here. You can access these files that I have. I’ve started writing up rules around everything. Eventually, when I do a campaign, Dungeons and Dragons, I really focus more on the storytelling. I do very little rolling and numbers and calculating all those things. I’m much more interested in the story that we tell together, which is what we were doing a lot of time. Eventually, I want to roll in the idea of actually rolling for all of these things, and [crosstalk]
>> AMBER: Really doing checks.
>> NICK: Yes.
>> AMBER: It could be like you go to use the ramp and if you roll under a 10, there’s going to be something blocking your way. If you roll over a 10, then there won’t be anything there and the ramp will work perfectly, that sort of thing?
>> NICK: Yes, exactly. That sort of stuff. It would make it dynamic and everything and allow for this kind of growing idea. I also am planning on adding campaigns, which would be a larger thing. Stringing together multiple scenarios and building a bigger idea and being able to look at the end of this stuff, how it affected these characters. The goals here are for teams to be able to get together and talk through these ideas and really help learn and understand how disabilities work, and that disabilities are not this really simple static thing that a lot of times we think through, but are larger comorbidities, dynamic disabilities, temporary disabilities.
Just a whole range of things in there. So be able to get teams together and do this with planning and then continue through those ideas with the rest of the phases by thinking through how it all interferes and reacts. I also really am focusing on the idea of not just digital spaces, but physical spaces. Imagine, for example, a planning committee for a town or county talking through the city that they’re in charge of, the county that they’re in charge of, and how people live and work inside of those places, which is really exciting to me.
I’m going to continue to be building this. I’m very open to feedback. You can find me on Threads mostly and on Bluesky. Not on Twitter as much anymore. Go ahead. You were going to say something, Amber?
>> AMBER: Yes. I was just going to say, thinking about it with my own business, if I were going to take some of this and do this with our team, we could put together scenarios like someone who’s going to buy, install, and activate our plugin and then trying to figure out, okay what are the barriers that they might encounter along the way, whether they’re on our website, whether they’re in the admin of WordPress, which we can’t even necessarily control because we have no idea what plugins and themes they have installed that might be modifying the admin, right? Or that kind of thing.
I like the idea that I could come up with a bunch of scenarios and then take personas and try to workshop them as a team to figure out what are these barriers that people might exist. I really appreciate that you brought this concept and it’s neat. I can’t wait to see how you continue to develop it. I see a lot of benefit in it.
>> NICK: Thank you. Thank you, everybody. I’m, again, I said, really, really excited. You saw how much I’m nerding out with all this. Thank you for the opportunity. Again, any feedback or anything else, I’m more than happy to take.
Links Mentioned
- Camp No Limits
- HMRC’s Virtual Empathy Hub
- Spoon Theory
- The Spoon Theory written by Christine Miserandino
About the Meetup
The WordPress Accessibility Meetup is a global group of WordPress developers, designers, and users interested in building more accessible websites. The meetup meets twice per month for presentations on a variety of topics related to making WordPress websites accessible to people of all abilities. Meetups are held on the 1st Thursday of the month at 10 AM Central/8 AM Pacific and on the 3rd Monday of the month at 7 PM Central/5 PM Pacific.
Learn more about WordPress Accessibility Meetup.
Summarized Session Information
In this session, Nick Croft explores how principles from Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) can be used to enhance accessibility and user experience at every stage of development. He introduces Access & Barriers, a tabletop role-playing game-inspired tool designed to help individuals and teams better understand disability, accessibility challenges, and the impact of access barriers.
The session covers the role of personas in accessibility planning, design, development, testing, and content creation. Nick discusses how integrating accessibility early in the development process can reduce costs and improve usability. He also presents real-world scenarios from the Access & Barriers tool, including challenges faced by disabled individuals in everyday situations such as retrieving mail from an inaccessible apartment building and dining at a restaurant with barriers to access.
Through interactive role-playing and problem-solving, participants gain insights into how accessibility obstacles impact different users and explore potential solutions. The session emphasizes proactive accessibility planning, user testing with disabled individuals, and the importance of empathy-driven design.
Session Outline
- Introduction
- Discovering personas
- Personas in planning
- Personas in design
- Personas in development
- Personas in testing
- Personas in content creation
- Access and Barriers: a new accessibility tool
- Conclusion
Introduction
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop role-playing game that encourages creativity, problem-solving, and role-playing—skills that can be applied to understanding disability, access needs, and barriers. In this presentation, Nick Croft covers a tool he has been developing for the past two and a half months to help individuals and teams better understand disability, accessibility, and the impact of access barriers.
Discovering personas
Personas are an essential tool for understanding real users. In digital development, personas help create shorthand communication for discussing user needs and experiences. However, they are not a replacement for user testing, especially with disabled users.
Personas help teams consider how different users—particularly those with disabilities—interact with digital content, products, and environments. Instead of generalizing disabled users, personas allow teams to think through individual user experiences. For example, if a team has a persona named “John” who is blind or low-vision, they can ask, “How does John use this feature?” This creates a more inclusive approach to planning and development.
How personas help
Personas provide a means to step into the experiences of diverse users. By defining personas, teams can better predict potential roadblocks and user pain points in digital and physical accessibility. Personas also foster more effective communication among teams, allowing designers, developers, and content creators to discuss accessibility in practical ways.
Personas should not replace actual user testing. While personas provide a foundational understanding of different accessibility challenges, real user feedback remains essential. Testing with disabled individuals ensures that the personas used in planning accurately reflect real-life needs and interactions.
Interactive personas tool
A great online tool to explore accessibility personas is Personas Prototype on Heroku. This tool provides different personas with various access needs and simulates how they interact with web environments. Each persona has unique characteristics, assistive technologies, frustrations, and required accommodations. Through a hands-on approach, teams can gain insights into accessibility barriers.
Personas in planning
Introducing accessibility considerations at the planning stage significantly reduces costs and development time. Studies show that addressing accessibility at the QA stage is four times more expensive than incorporating it at the beginning of the project.
Planning should include:
- What does the feature do?
- How will personas interact with it?
- What barriers might they face?
- How can we mitigate those barriers?
Planning is the most effective phase to integrate accessibility since it allows for proactive thinking rather than reactive fixes. By considering personas early in the project, teams can ensure that accessibility is built into the foundation rather than patched later. This saves time and money and results in better user experiences overall.
Example of accessibility in planning
Nick shared an example of designing a user registration form. Instead of waiting until testing to address accessibility barriers, the team can consider personas like John, a blind user, at the start. Questions to ask might include:
- How will John navigate the form using a screen reader?
- Are all form fields adequately labeled?
- Is error messaging clear and accessible?
- Are CAPTCHA alternatives available for visually impaired users?
Addressing these concerns at the planning stage ensures that accessibility is a core part of the design rather than an afterthought.
Personas in design
During the design phase, it is essential to consider:
- What should the persona understand most from the design?
- What actions should they take?
- How can the design help them achieve their goals?
- How can the design minimize negative experiences?
Accessibility in design is about making information easy to understand and interact with.
Example of accessibility in design
Nick covered an example of designing an e-commerce checkout page. By considering a persona with mobility impairments, the team made sure that:
- All buttons and form fields were large enough to click without precision movement.
- The page was fully navigable using only a keyboard.
- Auto-fill functionality was included to reduce the need for extensive typing.
- Clear error messages guided users on how to fix mistakes.
By designing with personas in mind, accessibility improvements benefit not only disabled users but everyone, creating a smoother and more efficient experience.
Personas in development
Developers must consider:
- How does the persona interact with the feature?
- What tools or assistive technologies do they use?
- Can the feature be used as intended by the persona?
Developers should use real assistive technology during development, such as screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, and speech-to-text software, to ensure that features are genuinely usable.
Example of accessibility in development
Nick discussed a project where a team built a complex dashboard. During testing with personas, they found that:
- Keyboard users had difficulty navigating drop-down menus.
- Screen reader users could not access dynamically updated content.
- Color contrast issues made it hard for low-vision users to read graphs.
By addressing these problems early in development, they improved the experience for all users before launch.
Personas in testing
Testing should include:
- Simulating different experiences using assistive technologies.
- Verifying screen reader compatibility.
- Ensuring accessible color contrast and text readability.
- Checking that forms and interactive elements function correctly for all users.
Testing should go beyond automated tools and include real user testing. While automated tools like WAVE and aXe can detect common issues, they do not replicate real user experiences.
By incorporating thorough testing methods, teams can create more inclusive experiences that work for diverse users.
Personas in content creation
Content should be written with accessibility in mind:
- How does the persona read content?
- What information are they looking for?
- How can content be structured to improve readability and comprehension?
It’s important to structure content to accommodate different cognitive needs and reading styles. Some best practices are:
- Plain language: writing in clear, straightforward language benefits users with cognitive disabilities and non-native speakers.
- Headings and lists: breaking down content into well-structured headings and bulleted lists improves readability and helps screen reader users navigate efficiently.
- Alternative descriptions: providing descriptive alt text for images, meaningful link text, and transcripts for multimedia content ensures accessibility for all users.
- Consistent formatting: avoiding excessive styling variations and maintaining a predictable structure reduces cognitive overload and enhances user experience.
Example of accessibility in content creation
Nick shared an example involving a corporate website redesign. Initially, long paragraphs made it difficult for users with dyslexia and ADHD to focus. By implementing structured headings, bullet points, and plain language, the readability and accessibility of the site improved significantly.
Access & Barriers: a new accessibility tool
Nick Croft introduced a new accessibility tool called Access & Barriers, a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG)-inspired exercise that helps teams think through accessibility challenges in a structured and engaging way.
This tool allows participants to take on the roles of individuals with disabilities and navigate different scenarios where they encounter accessibility barriers.
Purpose of Access & Barriers
The tool is designed to:
- Increase awareness of accessibility challenges in digital and physical spaces.
- Help teams develop empathy by stepping into the experiences of people with disabilities.
- Encourage teams to proactively plan for accessibility rather than reactively fixing issues.
- Improve understanding of how different accessibility barriers impact user experience and usability.
How the game works
Each participant or team selects a persona with a specific disability. These personas include individuals with vision impairments, mobility impairments, cognitive disabilities, and hearing impairments. The game then presents real-world scenarios, requiring players to navigate and solve problems based on their personas’ limitations.
Example scenario: checking the mail
Amber played the persona Meg, a disabled individual who has moved into a third-floor apartment. Meg knows that an important check, necessary for paying rent, is arriving in the mail. She needs to go to the first floor to check her mailbox and return to her apartment.
Challenges faced in the scenario
- Opening the door: Meg’s apartment does not have an automatic door opener. She must manually maneuver her wheelchair while opening the door, which is problematic. To solve this, she decides to put on her prosthetic leg, stand up, open the door, and then transition back into her wheelchair.
- Using the elevator: she makes her way to the elevator and presses the button, but the elevator does not arrive. She waits, growing increasingly frustrated. The elevator does not display any indicators of movement, so she calls the building supervisor.
- Lack of support: the supervisor informs her that the elevator is broken and will be fixed later but does not provide an exact timeline. When she asks if the supervisor can check her mail, he dismisses her request, stating he is too busy.
- Considering alternatives: Meg contemplates going down the stairs but realizes that doing so safely would be difficult, especially since she would have to return up three flights afterward. She considers calling a neighbor or a friend for help but feels conflicted about relying on others.
Possible solutions explored in the game
- Building maintenance accountability: ensuring that elevators in residential buildings are properly maintained to prevent extended outages.
- Community support: developing relationships with neighbors to create a support system for situations like this.
- Accessible apartment features: incorporating automatic door openers and alternative accessibility solutions within apartment buildings.
- Legal considerations: discussing tenants’ rights regarding accessibility failures in housing and potential advocacy efforts.
This scenario highlighted real-world barriers disabled individuals encounter daily, emphasizing the importance of accessible housing infrastructure and social support systems.
Example scenario: going to a restaurant
During another interactive play session, Amber, Paola, and Maureen each selected a persona and navigated a restaurant accessibility scenario:
- Amber played Chris, a 28-year-old quadriplegic celebrity who uses a power wheelchair and requires accessible spaces and assistive technology to communicate.
- Paola played Jerry, a 35-year-old stay-at-home dad who does not have a permanent disability but experiences temporary disabilities due to parenting, such as carrying children, being distracted, and having sensory overload.
- Maureen played Kate, a 22-year-old college student with dyscalculia, a learning disability that makes working with numbers and calculations particularly challenging.
Additional details about the personas
- Chris (Quadriplegic): Chris lost the use of his limbs due to a spinal cord injury. He relies on mouth-controlled technology for mobility and voice-to-text software for communication.
- Jerry (Temporary Disabilities): as a stay-at-home dad, Jerry frequently experiences situations where he has limited use of his hands, is distracted, or overwhelmed by noise and sensory input.
- Kate (Dyscalculia): Kate struggles with numbers and calculations. Tipping, reading menus with numeric values, and managing bills in a restaurant setting can be particularly stressful for her.
Challenges faced in the scenario
- Chris struggled with:
- The restaurant had stairs at the entrance, and although a ramp was available at a side entrance, a large planter was blocking part of the ramp, preventing him from accessing the restaurant.
- Jerry encountered:
- No direct accessibility issues but observed the challenges that Chris faced with navigating the entrance.
- Kate was affected by:
- The difficulty of calculating the bill and tip at the end of the meal, which required assistance from her friends.
Possible solutions explored in the game
- For Chris (Quadriplegic):
- Restaurants should ensure that accessible entrances remain unobstructed at all times.
- Staff should be trained to check for and address accessibility barriers regularly.
- For Kate (Dyscalculia):
- Restaurants could provide tip calculations directly on receipts to reduce the cognitive load of determining gratuities.
- Staff could be trained to assist with bill-splitting in a clear, patient manner when needed.
Through this scenario, teams discussed broader accessibility issues, such as how businesses can be more inclusive, how public spaces can reduce stress for disabled individuals, and how technology can be leveraged for better accessibility solutions.
Key takeaways from Access & Barriers
- Provides Real-World Application – The barriers discussed in the game are based on actual accessibility issues encountered by people with disabilities.
- Not All Disabilities Are the Same – The game highlights how different disabilities require different solutions. A fix that helps one persona may create new barriers for another.
- Interactive Learning is Effective – Hands-on role-playing exercises allow teams to better retain accessibility concepts.
- Encourages Proactive Thinking – The game helps teams think about accessibility from the start of a project rather than as an afterthought.
Using Access & Barriers in your workplace
Teams can use this tool to:
- Role-play different personas encountering accessibility barriers.
- Develop empathy and better understand disabled user experiences.
- Identify accessibility improvements early in the development process.
- Encourage proactive accessibility planning.
Conclusion
Disabilities are diverse, dynamic, and ever-changing. No single tool or simulation can fully replicate the lived experiences of disabled individuals. However, tools like Access & Barriers and Personas Prototype on Heroku can help teams improve their understanding of accessibility challenges and build more inclusive digital and physical environments.