Creating accessible personas
Personas are used across organisations in UX or marketing to help businesses better understand the customers they are serving. Like any deliverable, it’s important to consider the accessibility of personas so that your audience can understand and engage with them. Some of the main accessibility pain points for personas are centred on making sure your content is perceivable and understandable.
Contrast
Personas help bring information about your customers to life. As they tend to be highly visual, providing enough contrast for users to distinguish between backgrounds and elements is an important design consideration. Xtensio’s Traveler persona provides a lot of detail, but because the contrast is so low (1.96:1) between the persona quote and the background, it is almost impossible to read. Around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour vision deficiency — contrast issues might also affect dyslexic users, older users or reading information in bright lights/sunlight. Quotes help make your persona’s need or frustration easily understandable — don’t limit this benefit by using an inaccessible contrast ratio.
Recommendations: Ensure that colours used meet accessible contrast ratios — at least 4.5:1 or 3:1 for large text. Luckily, there are lots of online tools that can check contrast ratios for you, such as The Paciello Group’s Colour Contrast Analyser or WebAIM’s Contrast Checker.
Fonts
MailChimp’s personas look amazing and creative, and were even nominated for an award in 2013. However because the font is part of the image, it becomes pixelated while zooming, which might be difficult for a low vision user. Additionally, the text is presented in several fonts, including cursive, all capitals, bubble letters and letters facing in multiple different directions. This might make it hard to read for users that are neurodiverse such as dyslexic, ADHD or autistic, less confident digital users, low vision users or those with migraines.
Recommendations: Use a sans-serif font, minimum 12 pt. Use sentence case and avoid all capital letters or italics. Avoid using multiple font types where possible. Use real text instead of text within an image.
Icons
A primary problem with personas is getting the information balance right — too much text and people will not take the time to read, but with too many icons the information can be confusing and overwhelming. Some icons are perceived as universal icons — understood and recognisable by most users — such as Home, Search and Print. But often icons can have different meanings, are abstract or otherwise unclear. This can be especially problematic for users with cognitive or learning disabilities.
Recommendations: Remember to test with your users — just because something makes sense to you or your team does not mean that it makes sense to your users. If you are designing personas for your R&D teams, do testing with them to ensure they understand your icons.
Alt text
Don’t forget to include alt text for images used in your persona. Including alt text increases the overall usability for all users, as it provides information if the image fails to load. It also helps with search engine optimisation if your persona is on the web.
Recommendations: Scott Vinkle gives some advice on writing descriptive alt text. Finding the balance between descriptive enough and too much text can be difficult, but focus on describing the image in a clear and precise manner that provides context for the image’s relationship to the surrounding material leaving out things that are less important. Instead of “A pair of low-top shoes are placed on top of a dark-brown table in front of a white brick wall. The shoes are mostly dark blue with a white midsole, brown laces, a black back tab, and white lining.” — try “Dark blue, low-top shoes with white midsole, brown lace, black back tab, and white lining.”
Persona formats
PDFs are quick and easy to create without specialist skills, and are readily printed for offline consumption. However, PDFs are not responsive, they aren’t designed for optimal online experiences, they create navigation issues and are difficult to version/maintain.
Recommendations: Consider using HTML instead of print or image based versions of documents. This makes it easier to maintain, along with allowing users more flexibility in accessing them. Follow guidelines for non-HTML document accessibility if using other formats such as Powerpoint or PDF. Microsoft and Adobe both offer in product tools for checking accessibility of documents.
Have you thought about accessibility for your personas? What has worked or not worked in your experience? I’d love to hear about it.
Alicia is Director of Strategy at a digital consulting company. Follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter for more stories about customer experience, business design, creativity and innovation, strategic change and inclusive design.
