Ability Heuristics

Adaptability

Systems should adapt or be adaptable to a user’s dynamic situated abilities to reduce user burden and improve user-system-context fit. Options for personalization and customization should be apparent, accessible, flexible, expressive, predictable, changeable, undoable, and shareable, applicable to both functional and cosmetic aspects of interfaces.

Adaptability gives the user agency over their system’s settings, tailoring those settings to best meet a user’s needs, including if their abilities change over time or in different situations.

Equitable Experience

Systems should provide an equitable experience for users of all abilities, regardless of utilized interaction techniques, I/O devices and channels, and interaction pathways. Satisfaction, ease, efficiency, effectiveness, and information should be equitable, even if different, for all users.

Providing people with disabilities a comparable user experience to those without disabilities should be a priority of every designer. Using a system with a disability should not mean having a poor user experience, even if that experience must be somewhat different from that of others.

Flexible Task Completion

Common or important tasks, including error recovery, should have multiple pathways for achieving them, be able to be paused and resumed without loss of progress or context, and should not have a time dependency such that a user cannot move at their preferred pace. Extended tasks should communicate what will be required of the user.

Allowing tasks to be completed flexibly means that users can work in the ways that best suit their abilities and that they can achieve what they set out to do at their own pace.

Efficiency and Effectiveness of User Action

A user’s actions should be effective in bringing about their intended result in an efficient manner. Burdensome actions, especially repetitive ones, should be replaceable in favor of preferred ones.

By ensuring each action taken by users is efficient and effective, a system avoids frustrating or fatiguing users, and users can make progress towards their goals.

Multiple Modalities

Information coming to and from the user should be communicated via more than one modality and appropriately tailored to each modality. The same information should be available in each modality chosen by the user.

Different users prefer to communicate and receive information using different modalities, which rely on their different senses or abilities (e.g., seeing, hearing, touching, speaking, typing, gesturing). It is important for systems to convey and receive information in ways that users prefer.

Understandable Messages

Textual messages, including instructions, labels, feedback, and errors, should be conveyed in plain user-centered language. Such messages should also be available in the user’s preferred language. Non-textual messages such as icons, earcons, and hapticons should be as universally comprehensible as possible.

Messages may be visual, auditory, or haptic. Whatever their form, messages must be understandable to users, avoiding jargon and unnecessary complexity.

Ease of Adoption

Systems should use affordable, available, and/or open-source components that are compatible with third-party assistive technologies.

Access is not only about functionality but also about economics and availability. By using technologies that are based in and compatible with other commonly used, open-source, and/or assistive technologies, users can more easily integrate technologies into their lives and ensure they are not abandoned.

Ability Data Transparency

Systems should be transparent regarding the data they capture about a user’s abilities, how that data is used and stored, the rationale for capturing that data, who has access to it, and how the user can audit, correct, prevent, and enhance the use of that data in system models and settings.

Data collected about a user’s abilities is highly personal and must be always kept secure and private. It is essential that users have awareness of, access to, and agency over all data collected about themselves.

Help, Support, and Community

Systems should provide accessible help and support. Methods should be provided to access and share community knowledge. Systems should reflect a responsiveness to community feedback and needs.

When users have difficulties, they must be able to get the help they need. That help must itself be accessible, whether it comes from a company, fellow user, or community member. When an accessibility problem is raised by the community, it should be addressed promptly by the creators of the technology.