After all the WCAG standards are met, how accessible is your site for users with cognitive disabilities? How can you tell? What does that mean? Where would you even start?
I’d been making websites for over 20 years, and I didn’t understand what it was like to use the web with a cognitive disability until I developed one. After treatment to remove a slow-growing brain tumor, I had a hard time using most websites, including the ones I built! This real-world experience gave me a newfound perspective on accessibility, and I learned that there’s no better way to understand a user’s experience than living it. It also motivated me to learn new techniques that provide more accessible experiences for users with cognitive impairments and redesign parts of my sites with a focus on cognitive ease.
This session was in the Design Track.
About the Speaker
Alyssa Panetta has been designing and developing websites by hand since Y2K. She has worked for educational mathematics software companies and is currently a Web Designer/Developer for the University Libraries, University at Albany. After a diagnosis of brain cancer in 2020 and subsequent treatment, Alyssa started a website where she writes letters to her removed tumor that is preserved in a tumor research bank: deartalula.com.
Learn more about axe-con at https://www.deque.com/axe-con/