Cherry Thompson talks about cognitive impairments and web accessibility

Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic: Hi. I'm Nic Steenhout, and you are listening to the Accessibility Rules Soundbite, a series of short podcasts where people with disabilities explain their impairments and what barriers they encounter on the web. Nic: Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provide accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training, and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Nic: Today I'm talking with Cherry Thompson. Cherry is an Accessibility and Inclusion Consultant. They've got a background of professional visual arts and photography. Cherry changed field after a little bit over a decade. Cherry, thanks for being onboard. Cherry: Yeah, thanks for having me. Nic: So, let's get straight to it. Can you tell me what your disability is, what your impairment is? Cherry: Yeah. So I live with a rare disease called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. It's a disease that affects my connective tissues and soft tissues. It's kind of like brittle bone disease but for the soft tissues in my body, so my muscles, my tendons, my ligaments, things like that. It largely affects my joints and strength, and I'm also autistic and have ADHD. Nic: How does that mix together and how does that impact your ability to work on the web? What would be the biggest barrier you encounter when you're going on the web? Cherry: Most of my biggest barriers on the web are probably cognitive. I am affected a little by some fine motor skills, so if buttons are too small or too close together and the click point is too fine, then that can be a problem. But largely, things like CAPTCHAs, like you know when you have to login somewhere, the security CAPTCHAs, selecting the images. The reason for that is because cognitively, sometimes it can be really difficult to assess those images or to keep doing it. Sometimes it keeps asking you to do it for a few minutes. Cherry: And then also, things like dark mode or websites that have much too much contrast, so a really dark background with a really bright white fine text is really hard for me to read, from a cognitive standpoint and from a physical standpoint 'cause my eye muscles are affected. It leaves ghosting and things like that. Nic: That's interesting, because one of the things that is pushed for quite a bit is high contrast that helps people with low vision. So here we have an accommodation that works well for many people that actually has a negative impact on you, right? Cherry: Yeah. Dark mode does help me sometimes, but really it has to be not too strong a contrast. I much prefer dark mode in some applications, but if it's a dark gray with just a slightly off white text with a bolder font, then that works much better for me than say black background or nearly black background with white text. So it really depends on the contrast. If the contrast isn't too bad, then dark mode is incredibly helpful for me. Nic: Have you found a solution to that when you get to these sites? Is there something that allows you to work around it so it's more comfortable, easier to use? Cherry: If it's a website where there's a lot of text where I have to read it for my job or something like that, then I'll usually just go into the browser settings and try and change the system font and things like that and see if that will help. That depends obviously on the coding for the website, whether that takes effect or not. But often if it's not a website that is necessary for me to look at, then I just won't look at it if it requires too much reading with too much contrast. Nic: Yeah, that's fair enough. Cherry, if there was one thing that you would like developers or designers to remember about accessibility, what would it be? Cherry: Yeah. I think the biggest thing that I often like to remind developers and designers is that accessibility for one group of people often helps with accessibility for another group o