Personalization for Cognitive Accessibility
A new section introducing personalization and content lifted from various points in the Design Guide.
Personalization for Cognitive Accessibility
Many of the Patterns in this Design Guide demonstrate the highly individual nature of users’ preferences. What suites one user may not be useful for another. In addition, a user’s preferences are likely change with their environmental context or over time, both daily or longer term. While this is true of all accessibility preferences, cognitive accessibility brings the benefits of personalization to the forefront of design and implementation.
The W3C WAI work on personalization provides a mechanism for content authors to mark up content and controls so that users are presented with something that more closely matches their individual preferences as specified to the User Agent (eg web browser). Thus, providing personalization as way of easily adjusting the presentation and interaction of web content will benefit users with cognitive accessibility preferences. For example, users of communications symbols can be present with content enhanced with appropriate symbols but non symbol users wil not be confused by the additional information.