50+ Web Sites Intended to be Accessible to People with Cognitive Disabilities

~ John Rochford

I have created an index of Web sites I have assessed as intending to be accessible to people with cognitive disabilities.  At the time of this writing, there are over fifty.  The criteria I used to identify them are essentially twofold:

  1. the site-sponsoring organizations serve people with cognitive disabilities;  and
  2. the sites incorporate at least one feature described in WebAIM’s latest “Cognitive Web Accessibility Checklist“.

I also limited my search to sites of countries where English is the dominant- or official language.  These included Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and those of The United Kingdom.  I plan to expand my search to other such countries, starting with the largest, India.

For the purposes of this project, I considered “cognitive disability” to include Alzheimer’s Disease, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Brain Injury, Intellectual Disabilities, Learning Disabilities (Dyslexia & Dyscalculia) & Mental Illness (Bipolar, Depression & Schizophrenia).

Of organizations that serve people with Alzheimer’s Disease, Brain Injury, and/or Mental Illness, I have not found related Web sites that include cognitive-accessibility features.  I suppose these sites are not designed to be used by their constituencies, but instead by the people who serve them.

The vast majority of Web sites I found, which did include cognitive-accessibility features, were those of organizations that serve people with intellectual disabilities.  They make an apparent effort to be accessible to their constituencies.  I thus made a sub-list just for them, of which most are in England.  Note: In The United Kingdom, “intellectual disabilities” are also referred to as “Learning Disabilities” or “Learning Difficulties”.

Common accessibility features of these sites include a default-large text size; text-size enlargers; plain language; text-to-speech; contextually-relevant images; and graphics or icons paired with text.

Characteristics Of Web Site Listings

  • All are sorted by country.
  • All have links to the Web sites.
  • All are annotated with a description of the organization’s mission or the site’s purpose.  All annotations are edited quotes from the site’s pages (Home, About Us or Mission).

Links to Web Sites Indexes & RSS Feed

Future Indexes

In the near future, I will publish other such indexes. To see a list, please refer to my previous post, “Upcoming Indexes of Resources Related to Cognitive Web Accessibility“.

Notes