Re: Breaking it Down: Types of Cognitive Disabilities

Let's look at a slightly different approach - what are the different kinds of
functional requirements? This doesn't really group cognitive disabilities by
themselves, since the different requirements cover some other groups as
well. But it probably helps us answer the question "what do we need to do to
solve the problem?".

Here are some guesses

+ Not being able to read text (but not having a problem with arbitrarily
  complex content)

+ Not being able to concentrate on one thing among many potential
  distractions

+ Not being able to comprehend abstract concepts without concrete examples

+ Not being able to understand complex oral language

I trust there are people in this discussion who can improve on this.

cheers

Charles McCN


On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

  Can someone provide a roughly comprehensive list of cognitive
  disability types and what problems those people might have in
  accessing information?  For example:
  
  DISABILITY           ACCESS PROBLEM
  
  Dyslexia             May not be able to read words quickly and
                        may not be able to enter text (such as in
                        search boxes) without misspellings
  
  etc.
  
  Note that I'm not a dyslexia expert so the above entry is probably
  WRONG, it's an example of the type of information I'd like to see
  listed.
  
  (The next step in the chart above, of course, would be a third
  column that describes how we can best address those access problems
  and solve them!)
  
  How many types of users are we grouping together when we glibly use
  the term "CD"?  That's what I need to know...
  
  --Kynn
  
  -- 
  Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
  Director of Accessibility, edapta                  http://www.edapta.com/
  Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
  AWARE Center Director                         http://www.awarecenter.org/
  Next of Kynn: a quasi-regular web log           http://www.kynn.com/next/
  
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2000 18:33:26 UTC