Disability-Inclusive Personas

Build personas where disability is woven into the full picture of a person — their goals, frustrations, context, and behaviour — not isolated as a special category.

The Problem with "Accessibility Personas"

Most teams either:

1. Create personas with no mention of disability at all, or
2. Create separate "accessibility personas" that exist only to represent a disability

Both fail. The first excludes. The second reduces a person to their disability and ensures they're only considered when someone remembers to look at the "accessibility slide."

The Better Approach

Every persona set should include disability as one dimension among many — the same way you include age, technical confidence, or context of use. Some personas will have disabilities. All personas exist in contexts that create situational impairment.

Persona Dimensions to Include

For every persona, consider:

Permanent Disability

• Visual: blind, low vision, colour vision deficiency
• Hearing: deaf, hard of hearing
• Motor: limited dexterity, tremor, paralysis, limb difference
• Cognitive: dyslexia, ADHD, autism, memory difficulties
• Speech: stutter, non-verbal, atypical speech

Temporary Impairment

• Broken arm, eye surgery recovery, concussion, medication side effects, ear infection, dental procedure

Situational Impairment

• Bright sunlight on screen, noisy environment, carrying a child, wearing gloves, driving, multitasking, unfamiliar language, emotional distress, fatigue

Intersectionality

• A persona can have multiple conditions
• Disability intersects with age, language, income, technical skill
• A 65-year-old with low vision AND limited broadband AND a second language has compounding access barriers

How to Include Disability Naturally

In the Bio

Don't: "Sarah is blind." Do: "Sarah is a project manager who has been blind since birth. She uses JAWS screen reader on her work laptop and VoiceOver on her iPhone. She's fast with keyboard shortcuts and gets frustrated by interfaces that waste her time."

In Goals and Frustrations

Don't: list disability under "Challenges" Do: show how the disability shapes what good and bad experiences look like. "Sarah's goal is to review her team's status updates in under 10 minutes. Her biggest frustration is dashboards that require a mouse to access key data."

In Context of Use

Include the assistive technology and environment:

• What device and assistive technology do they use?
• What's their environment? (noisy, quiet, mobile, desktop)
• What's their energy level? (morning, end of long day)
• Who else is present? (alone, with family, in public)

In the Scenario

The persona's scenario should show them using the product with their actual setup — not a theoretical clean-room test.

Minimum Diversity Rule

For any persona set of 4 or more:

• At least one persona should have a permanent disability
• At least one persona should have a situational impairment
• At least two personas should vary in technical confidence
• The set should vary across age, language, and context

This is a minimum, not a target.

Assessment Questions

1. Does the persona set include at least one person with a disability?
2. Is disability integrated into the full persona, not isolated?
3. Are assistive technology and environment specified?
4. Does the persona's scenario reflect real-world usage with their setup?
5. Are situational impairments represented across the set?