The State of Web Accessibility for People with Cognitive Disabilities: A Rapid Evidence Assessment.

Sara Gartland,Jose De Sousa Fialho,Maria Ana Carneiro,Amy Harris,Clare Cullen,Emma Hamilton,Greg Holloway,Paul Flynn,Joe Cullen

doi:10.3390/bs12020026

Abstract

Increased digitisation of day-to-day activities was occurring prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic only accelerated the virtual shift, making web accessibility an urgent issue, especially for marginalised populations. Despite decades of work to develop, refine, and implement web accessibility standards, people with cognitive disabilities regularly experience many barriers to web accessibility. To inform ongoing work to improve web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, a systematic review was conducted. The main question guiding this review is: what are the state-of-the-art of interventions that support web accessibility for citizens, 9 years of age and up, living with cognitive impairment? A set of 50 search strings were entered into three academic databases: SCOPUS, ProQuest, and Web of Science. Systematic screening procedures narrowed the search returns to a total of 45 included papers. A data analysis revealed themes associated with the lived experiences of people with cognitive disabilities, tools for improving web accessibility, and methodological best practices for involving people with cognitive disabilities in research. These findings have immediate implications for ongoing research and the development of meaningful solutions to the problem of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic sharply increased the embeddedness of digital technologies in daily life which simultaneously amplified existing social, educational, and economic inequities
Research highlighted the importance of better understanding the barriers to technology use experienced by people with cognitive disabilities [1,2,3], a group that is often marginalised in society and in research [4]
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent expansion of digital technologies associated with education, wellness, and employment makes the need to understand how people with cognitive disabilities interact with such technologies increasingly urgent

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic sharply increased the embeddedness of digital technologies in daily life which simultaneously amplified existing social, educational, and economic inequities. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent expansion of digital technologies associated with education, wellness, and employment makes the need to understand how people with cognitive disabilities interact with such technologies increasingly urgent. A crucial first step is to develop an understanding of the current state of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities. The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) serve as a foundation for EU and individual state policies. An initial review of policy and guideline articles revealed that only parts of the CRPD and the WCAG are included in the EU and individual state policies. The CRPD and the WCAG are more comprehensive and rigorous in their targets for accessibility than the EU and individual state policies

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