Creating Personas with Disabilities

Abstract

Personas can help raise awareness among stakeholders about users’ needs. While personas are made-up people, they are based on facts gathered from user research. Personas can also be used to raise awareness of universal design and accessibility needs of people with disabilities. We review the current state of the art of the personas and review some research and industry projects that use them. We outline techniques that can be used to create personas with disabilities. This includes advice on how to get more information about assistive technology and how to better include people with disabilities in the persona creation process. We also describe our use of personas with disabilities in several projects and discuss how it has helped to find accessibility issues.