Additional Coga Info

Let's talk about additional COGA info. And what I mean by COGA is the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Task Force from W3C.

COGA is important because these are users with cognitive and learning disabilities and they are not very well represented in what WCAG 2 does.

and this has been a long time like contentious thing so now we're getting these things called

supplemental guidance and this supplemental guidance basically adds to WCAG in terms of like

oh what else can you do to address the needs of people who are who have cognitive disabilities or

who have a learning disability. And this is like, it's super important stuff, like the

supplemental guidance has a lot of interesting things on it. I don't think everything is like

super relevant for this discussion today. But you know, if you want to extend beyond WCAG,

in terms of best practices, this is a great way to say like, okay, from the actual testable criteria,

What else can we do? And I've picked some examples here from those supplemental guidance documents.

First one is make each step clear. So if you have a step-by-step process, you might want to

introduce breadcrumbs, you might want to have headings that say like, okay, this is the first

thing you need to do, this second thing you need to do, this is the third thing you need to do.

And as the third example they have a "how I get here" button that basically tells

then the user "oh you've been at this page and that page and this is why you are here now",

which can be useful. I've never seen that implemented on a website but I would like it.

The second design principle is make it easy to find the most important tasks and features.

And this is something that often people do automatically or think they are doing automatically on their websites because they have like intro banners and other things that they want users to click on.

And it's usually good for the business, right, to have those kinds of tasks because that's usually what you want people to click on and do.

So the key tasks, you always should put them on the homepage.

You should use callout boxes for those features and give them an important visual weight.

You want to keep them on the top of the page so you can find them quickly and don't need to scroll.

And you want to use headings and maybe even include them into the top navigation, like top-level navigation, if they are so important.

And this is like where you need to come in and do your user testing and your user interviews and say like, hey, what did you want to do and what was the way that you went through the page?

What is the task?

And then say like, yeah, okay, how can we surface this earlier?

How can we make your journey easier to get this task done?

Because obviously, if you have a cognitive disability or if you're just like a stressed parent or something like that, you always have your limited time to do these kinds of interactions.

And if you can't do it in that time window that you have, and that might only be like, you know, 15 minutes because you feel exhausted or you don't have the time or headspace for that after that.

That can really make the difference between getting a task done or not getting it done.

So making important stuff visible and obvious is super needed.

Break media into chunks.

So if you have long media segments, you want to make sure that you have them in a logical, short, labeled, easy to identify, and easily jump to order.

and you can jump around.

Like we split these recordings up exactly for that reason.

So you have an easier way to get around and find what you're looking for.

Next one is use clear words.

Clear words are super important.

And you have to make sure to really limit yourself to the most common words, especially if you are trying to reach a broad audience.

So in general, if people have a severe language impairment, then you want to concentrate on the 1500 most common words and phrases.

And sometimes you need to get around it and explain something that is more complex.

But you then have to explain it in those simple terms or clearer terms.

You want, in that same vein, you want to remove unnecessary or vague words.

This is especially important for people with ADHD or who have other cognitive disabilities who take things very literally.

You know, you might, if it says like, oh, bring your passport and other documents, they might, rightly so, I might add, say like, oh, what are those other documents?

And if that's not in there, you know, it creates a barrier for doing what needs to be done.

You want to remove or explain uncommon acronyms, abbreviations, and jargon.

We already talked about that.

It's super important.

And you for sure should be doing that.

You should not invent new words or give words new meanings in your application.

Yeah, that's good advice.

I wish, you know, the accessibility people would do this sometimes.

Speaking of redefining what text means.

Then you want to use simple tense and voice.

You don't want to like go into too many details and, you know, using like tenses that are like uncommon.

So use something like your stock spent up last month and don't do something like over the last month we saw your stock increasing.

You know, it's like this is more complicated than it needs to be.

So just make it, uh, make it simple and make it present tense if it's in the present, uh, and don't, uh, don't put too much, uh, a complication into it.

Uh, in a similar vein, uh, next one, avoid double negatives or nested clauses, especially when writing English.

It's so easy to do, like having those double negatives in there or having like super long sentences with commas and conjunctions.

It's something that English likes to do a lot.

I think, well, I don't know about Swedish, but in German you have more often you have like these more simple sentences.

And I think that's actually quite good.

So try to avoid the double negatives and nested clauses.

So don't write something like, do not write unclearly.

I don't know who would say something like that.

Like, write clearly is just better.

So time is not unlimited.

Okay, I can see that in like something like a game show.

You have like, time is not unlimited.

Get, you know, get going.

But in reality, you want to say time is limited.

You're done.

It's so easy.

And then like the long sentences, something like, usually clauses will be separated by two commas, one before and after, or the word or, or the word and.

And so you could replace the sentence with a list of options or even more than one paragraph.

Yeah.

Just rip them apart.

Say, usually clauses will be separated by two commas, full stop.

One comma before and one after the word, full stop.

You know, and so on and so forth.

So you want to just slice and dice those sentences because they are terrible to read and terrible to understand.

You also want to avoid literal language.

So this is basically like the inverse of the, oh, you don't want to make it too general.

But some people want or some people take everything very literally.

And so you want to make sure that they can understand what you're saying.

So, for example, avoid something like, if you are experiencing cold feet before starting, take a deep breath and jump in.

So in this case, what does cold feet mean? What does deep breath and jumping in mean?

That's like, okay, these are metaphors and some people have a harder time understanding those metaphors.

and can also be different when you come from different like social societal or linguistic

backgrounds you know something that is an easy thing for me to understand might not be an easy

thing for other people to understand so you want to be as literal as possible I guess

as as descriptive as possible so in this case they use as an alternative if you are experiencing

anxiety disorders before starting take a deep breath tell yourself you can do it and get started

anxiety can include nervousness fear dizziness or shortness of breath which i think i think this is

way too long for what it tries to do but uh you know it's a good effort so um yeah so i would

probably say something like if you feel anxious before starting you know take a deep breath and

tell yourself that you can do it and then get started so that that's what i would do i would

not be too specific here because you want to balance that right this is this is like the big

challenge of these types of guidance is that you need, and you must balance it with the, with the

other things like simple language and keeping stuff succinct. Talking of, keep text succinct.

That's the other design principle here. So you want to keep paragraphs short, you want only to

to have one topic in each paragraph. You try to have the aim, so the central point of the paragraph

at the beginning. So always front load. If you can, you want to use short sentences and have

only one point per sentence. You want to use a bulleted or numbered list. And you want to have

short descriptive headings. So, you know, keeping it tight, tight. That's the important thing here.

Then you want to use clear, unambiguous formatting and punctuation. So you want to, you know,

use your language and make sure that that is proper in your content. You want to use punctuation

that is correct for the language that you're writing in. So if you have different ways to have

like quotes, you want to make sure that you reflect that. And you want to avoid the use

of Roman numerals, because they are just hard to read. So you also want to provide a summary of

long documents and media to users. And that means providing a text summary, as we have talked about

before that can be understood by people with a lower secondary education level.

But also reading ability, of course.

But also just catering to people who have not an attention span that is too long.

So keeping things short into and summarizing it into summarizations.

That's super useful.

And you always want to include the main points from the content in the summary.

So basically going through the summary should give them all the information,

at least all the key information that is in the full text or in the full medium.

If you have something that has instructions, make sure to include all the steps, including the obvious ones. Use numbers and lists to make sure that, OK, this is how this goes.

You want to provide complex instructions in an if-then table.

So that is basically you have on the left, if this happens, then on the right that happens.

And then you have other ifs and thens.

And that can be useful for things like medicine information where you have like symptoms and then how to remediate them and stuff like that.

And you want to use graphics as visual aid.

And if you want to really have a good look into how to best do some of these things, look at an IKEA building instruction, look at a Lego building instruction.

They really have that nailed down and it's always interesting to compare them to other things that have instructions.

Because, I mean, as much as IKEA is a furniture company and LEGO is a brick company, they are also instruction companies, like, you know, 99% of their work, I guess.

goes into like honing and making those instructions better and that's really a lot of good stuff going on there.

Then you want to use whitespace. Whitespace is the space between objects and text including boxes, paragraph headings and content so that each section is clearly separated.

And we have seen that with the headings, you want to have space around that, a little bit more space at the top, a little bit less space at the bottom, so that it's clear what belongs together.

So that's what white space can do.

And it's a super important visual concept that you should adhere to.

Then in some circumstances, it might be needed to explain implied content.

And implied content includes things that are graphics that, when used alone,

identifies that something is important or should be remembered.

Or it can be something like sarcasm in text.

So sometimes on Twitter, you have the little slash S behind the tweet.

So you know that it's sarcasm.

And that can be useful because some people have a hard time telling sarcasm and non-sarcasm apart.

Then you want to use animations to add importance or communicate something contrary to the literal meaning of the paired text.

So if you have, you know, text and then you contract that with an image or with a description, then you want to make sure that that's available to people.

Then there's provide alternatives for numerical concepts.

And that's basically just making sure that you have non-numerical concepts when you are describing something.

So, for example, if it is 20 degrees Celsius, we all know that that's actually quite mild, nice weather.

But, you know, you can't just imply that.

some people have because of things like dyscalculia, which is basically the same thing as dyslexia.

But for numbers, they can't as easily make the connection between a number and a feeling

like hot, cold, warm and stuff like that.

So that's why you usually get like a little icon next to the temperature that defines

if something is warm or if this weather is good.

So in this case, you want to say like,

hey, it's a mild 20 degrees and you're done.

And then we come to the last

and probably most ironic of these design principles,

and it's avoid too much content.

And there's that description,

which I will try to summarize as best as I can.

So they want you to avoid long paragraphs,

lots of choices and non-meaningful imagery because that ensures those with cognitive and learning disabilities can not concentrate on the important points being made.

So basically make it as bare bones and not overwhelming.

So short bullet points, again, limiting to one or two images related to the main subject area.

And just, you know, being sure that it's easy to digest what's on the page.

And this obviously is for unnecessary information.

So not asking you to add too much flourish and distraction to it.

And it's important to know that too much information or instruction can be just as much of a hindrance as too little.

So you really want to strike a good balance there and to use a testing with your content and to get into the best practice what's right for you and for the content that you provide.

And the goal is, as they say, to make certain that enough information is provided without undue confusion or navigation, which, you know, that makes a lot of sense.

So basically reduce the content that you put out there, but make it very good because then everyone benefits from it.

Thank you.