Cognitive accessibility goes beyond physical impairments. It addresses how different brains process information based on neurodiversity, age, education, and cognitive style. I analyzed four major websites and found issues affecting up to 50% of their potential users.
Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I'm a staff full-stack engineer. I build and scale SaaS platforms to millions of users, working end-to-end from system architecture to frontend to mobile. On this blog I explore how design decisions impact real users across the full spectrum of human cognition.
Cognitive accessibility is a discipline of improving websites and services to accommodate people with various ways how they receive, process and interact with them. Contrary to standard accessibility that focuses on physical aspects of a human, cognitive accessibility focuses on what are differences of how our brains process information due to various aspects like neurodiversity, life specialization, type of brain, age and more.
Today I'll show you some examples of how popular websites can benefit from improvements to their cognitive accessibility.
Jira: Corporate Jargon Excludes 12% of Users
The first example will be the Jira page. Jira is a popular task management system, and as every management system, it could have been used by everyone. However, when we look at their page, we see something surprising.
While overall the page has a moderate score of 68, we see that people with primary education can have serious difficulties to understand what Atlassian tries to tell them.
For example this sentence:
"Align work to goals: Connect work to company impact and collaborate with cross-functional partners."
Is not only corporate jargon but also isn't digestible by 12% of society.
Duolingo: Tech Words Alienate Elderly Users
We can think that maybe Jira is only for educated people, but what about Duolingo? Everyone can want to learn a new language right?
At the first sight it looks like regular English words. Not too fancy, doesn't use any weird slang words. So what is the problem here? Several ones including "integrates," "assessment science," and "AI" that won't resonate with older users.