Accessibility Personas

When creating products with accessibility baked-in from the start, the most successful product design teams include Accessibility Personas. A persona is a fictional example of product users, including their key behaviors, goals, and responsibilities. Personas for accessibility would include people with disabilities as users of the product from the start.

“While a persona is not a real person, it represents the real people who use your product.”

The above quote from Hotjar (opens in a new tab) highlights where teams discriminate from the very beginning: they tend to think that people with disabilities don’t exist as users of their product. But they do! Or they would, if the product didn’t block them from using it.

Personas are a tool to use in the planning and design phases. They can’t replace testing with real users, especially since personas could include some of the same biases and assumptions that able-bodied teams use as starting points.

Examples of accessibility personas

We are fortunate that some of the teams who have created personas with accessibility in mind have shared their work online. Here are some resources to check out:

Product brainstorming

E-Commerce: Baking/cooking products
Finance
Education

Shift Left Exercise 1