Digital accessibility is the practice of designing digital content that can be perceived, operated, and understood by people with disabilities. This includes, websites, apps, documents, and media. WCAG 2.1 Level AA has become the global benchmark and guidelines for making content digitally accessible. WCAG offer technical guidance for making content accessible to people using assistive technology for vision, hearing, mobility, and cognitive support.
During a training I had somebody ask me what's the difference between digital accessibility and cognitive accessibility? I said let's start with digital accessibility. Digital accessibility centers the practice of designing digital content and tools so people of all abilities can independently access, understand, navigate, and use them. Cognitive accessibility is the practice of designing and developing digital content and online spaces to be easily understandable and usable for people who have specific cognitive and learning needs. Digital accessibility is required by several federal mandates and focuses heavily on ensuring access to digital materials for all users. In contrast, cognitive accessibility is not legally required.
The legal standard for digital accessibility compliance is currently called WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. A collective of accessibility specialists called the World Wide Web Consortium, have created this set of guidelines for making digital materials accessible. This includes people who use assistive technology to support their vision, hearing or mobility. Let me give you an example here. So text to speech is necessary for blind or low vision folks to access written materials. It might also be helpful for dyslexic — another example. Captions on a video are essential for people who are deaf to access the spoken content of a video. Captions can also be helpful for people who prefer a dual sensory experience of the audio and text on the screen. So when we talk about digital accessibility, there are some cognitive accessibility features baked into these guidelines.
The World Wide Web Consortium also has created a set of guidelines called COGA, Cognitive Accessibility Guidelines. These recommendations give general advice for making neuroinclusive digital content and tools. COGA emphasizes the importance of including people with cognitive and learning disabilities in the design and development processes of creating digital content and systems. Accessibility specialists are coming together and revising these standards based on their experiences and research, so we're still figuring it out. And we're especially trying to figure out how to make content cognitively accessible. This is a hard task because everybody's minds work differently. What I'm talking about is neurodiversity. Neurodivergent scholar Nick Walker defines neurodiversity as, “the diversity of human minds, the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.” There is diversity across how all our minds work. So often there is no one-size-fits-all approach to ensure cognitive accessibility. As institutions, we have to dig deeper and connect with people in our community and client base to ask people what works for them and what they need. This is a continuous process. Imagine you're a classroom teacher. Every year you have new students coming in with different learning needs. It's important that you build a connection with each of your students so they feel comfortable telling you what they need, so together you can form an effective learning experience.
Building this kind of ongoing connection with your community takes real investment, especially for a large organization. But the research backs up why it's worth it. Studies on cognitive load consistently show that when we reduce the mental effort it takes to process content, people engage more, retain more, and stick around longer. Universal Design for Learning Research shows something similar. When content offers multiple ways to access, understand, and interact with it, engagement from your audience improves. This holds true internally too. Some of the clearest evidence comes from healthcare. Multiple systematic reviews and meta analysis link poor usability in electronic health records directly to clinician burnout. More so than workload itself. Therefore, cognitive accessibility is necessary to support motivation and well-being. Digital accessibility gives us the foundation, the legal floor and the technical starting point. But it's not the ceiling. Making your content accessible means going beyond what WCAG requires and going deeper into the ongoing work of learning directly from your communities about what they need. That's the path forward. Build your foundation with digital accessibility practices and then open channels of communication for people to tell you what they actually need.