Personae and Use Cases for WCAG 2.0


Guidelines and Techniques

The people who would want to use WCAG 2.0 fall neatly into two main categories, professionals and non-professionals. There is one important difference between pro and non-pro, motivation. The vast majority of pros using WCAG 2.0 are going to be doing it on a business case. This might be for increased market share, or legal reasons but critically they are doing it as long as it isn’t too much work. The definition of too much work of course depends on the company policy and individual doing the work. Thus professionals using the document are split into willing and unwilling. For example a PwD (not necessarily impaired using the web) would be much more willing to consider and spend time on accessibility due to the empathy their own disability gives them.

Professional
Willing Unwilling
Designer Designer
Programmer Programmer
Lawyer / Manager(legal assessment)
Accessibility Professional


Non-professionals
Willing Unwilling
PwD looking for info
Web master wanting to be compliant

Marc


Marc - white man, wearing a toboggan style hat, glasses and layered clothes, sitting behind a computer with a serious expression

“I just want to make sure my design looks ok, but I have to follow these standards too.”

 Marc spent a lot of work on this project doing what he does best, graphic design. He knows he has to make it accessible too but his design comes first. He hasn’t really thought about the accessibility much, and finds the documents rather too long. He might buy a book on the subject but is more likely to buy a new game for his Play Station 2.

Age: 26
Company: Small web design company
Potential: Marc loves design and he could get used to making all his sites with accessibility in mind. Making great looking sites isn’t 9 to 5 for Marc so he really does want to do the best job he can. Right now though he thinks accessibility just gets in the way.

Andy


Andy - white man, wearing dark sunglasses and a black t-shirt with a tatoo visible, sitting beside a computer with a serious expression

“I have a deadline, and it’s not like we have any disabled users anyway. I looked at the server logs I should know.”

Andy is ‘elite’, a hardcore code monkey. He runs the web servers, and codes on the web site. The most technical guy in the company he takes the lead with technical decisions. He thinks all this accessibility stuff is just ‘PC BS’ it’s not like people with disabilities ever come onto his site.

Age: 34
Company: Medium sized food packaging company
Potential: Andy doesn’t see the need for accessibility. His boss heard about it and told him to check it out. However since Andy is the only person who knows how to do the web sites ultimately it’s his decision. Unless he sees the need for it he isn’t going to waste his time, after all this is just a 9 till 5 job. He has better things to do at night with a Linux kernel.

Jessica


Jessica - white woman, wearing sunglasses and business attire, walking outside and smiling


“I haven’t got time to mess around. I need to know where we stand, legally speaking.”

Jessica likes power suits, power meetings and power bars for power lunches. She is responsible for risk management at her company. She wants to know where her company would stand in a lawsuit. She wants concise information that she can verify with the team responsible for the company intranet and web sites.

Age: 28
Company: Large enterprise industrial company
Potential: Jessica is keen to see that her company is covered. She would probably be happy with the minimum needed to cover her bases. However she could easily be persuaded to push the web development team that little bit further to achieve that extra level of compliance, and legal safety.

Mary


Mary - Asian woman, wearing tank top, sitting inside and smiling

“It would be nice to know what I can expect from web sites. I know they are supposed to help me but I don’t know how exactly.”

Mary has a motor neuron condition which impairs her movement. Most of her friends say ‘Mary just walks a little funny’ but she also has trouble with a mouse. Mary would love to know what web sites are supposed to be doing for her but she isn’t overly technical.

Age: 19
Company: Mary is doing a Degree at college
Potential: If Mary knew what was a reasonable amount of accessibility for web sites to offer she might write a few letters when web sites didn’t meet those standards. She would probably complain to the faculty that their supposedly accessible web site didn’t really help her, and these people at the W3C said it wouldn’t be to hard to fix.