Proposed Vision for Roadmap

The aim of the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force (COGA) is to improve Web accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities.
This is a discussion document,  that looks at what could be done for accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities. It is intended to help us (COGA) identify what needs to be done to get there.
Note: Much of this may be out of scope for our mandate and role as a W3C task force.

What is needed?

Techniques for everyone

There is a substantial amount of techniques  that are helpful  for over 90% of people with cognitive disabilities. These techniques need to be gathered in one place.
For example, most people with any cognitive disability may be disturbed when form data is lost when a session times out. Almost all COGA use groups may need help or  need to double check data entered into a form. Timing out so that they need to start again may make a form unusable.
See http://accessibility.athena-ict.com/TechniquesCOGA.html for sample page / format to help us gather techniques as we come across them, so that they do not get forgotten or are hard to find later when we are finished the gap analysis.

Techniques that are good for some user groups  with cognitive disabilities

We also need to document t techniques that are good for some COGA user groups and not for others (depends on cognitive function and localization). For example, text under symbols may be useful for many people with dementia but unhelpful for many people with severe language disabilities.
In a localization example using left hand side text alignment is helpful for  English sites but right hand side text alignment is  helpful for sites in Arabic or Hebrew.
See http://accessibility.athena-ict.com/TechniquesCOGA.html  for sample page structure and more examples.

Clumping and labeling techniques  into enhancements.

Once we have a comprehensive set of techniques  we may want to grope techniques  into “enhancements”. For example, we may make a group of techniques as “simple text” enhancements, making it easier to reference.
We may also want to identify how different enhancements benefit people with different limitations of cognitive functions.
To achieve this we may need to label groups of cognitive functions, so that we ca simplify linking enhancements to cognitive functions. See http://accessibility.athena-ict.com/cognativefunction.shtml for an initial page of cognitive function.

Enable users  finding content that works for them via metadata
Once we have a set of enhancements we can enable standards such as EARL to identify  which documents support which enhancements.. Other supported systems include GPII, ISO, Cload4All and possibly Fluid.
Adaptable pages
Once we have a comprehensive set of techniques we can also explore what is needed to make a website adaptable to different COGA groups of users.  We may be able to identify semantics that enable adaptation for specific learning and cognitive disabilities and to conflicting needs of different users.
This could include:

• Adaptive text: This would enable text to become simpler or more literal or adapt to the user needs.
• Adaptive components: There are many ways to make the same widget. Because different web site implement the same functions differently the user needs to learn how to interact and use with the specific page widgets. Enabling adaptive components would enable the user to use one interface, that they know how to use, across many different sites.
• Adaptive pages: This would enable changing or adapting the page layout , cutting out extra features or confusing aspects of the page. This would semantics to enable adaptive interfaces and AT. This would enable adaptive interfaces to allow users to use complex interfaces via an independent and familiar interface tailored to their scenarios and strengths. As this interface is designed for the user/user group, all features are familiar and the same buttons and metaphor will be used across all conforment applications.
• Adaptive media:
• Adaptive forms and billing: This may result in suggestions to ARIA 2.0  and PF for additional semantics to enable AT to provide techniques  

(See http://accessibility.athena-ict.com/cognitive/adaptable1.html for more information)
This may result in suggestions  to PF group for the ARIA 2.0 specification

Special Projects

There may be other accommodations that are needed that our outside the handshaking approach or adaptable pages

• Accessible menu systems for people with  cognitive disabilities: This will look at what measures or techniques  could make phone menu systems usable by for people with  cognitive disabilities, such as enabling people to reach an operator.  (Relevant specification: voice Ml)
• Interoperable AAC symbols AND
• Lexicon and symbol that support low literacy.
• Labels for cognitive function: See http://accessibility.athena-ict.com/cognativefunction.shtml for an early draft

See https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/cognitive-a11y-tf/wiki/Section_3 for more ideas.