This tool contains content generated by people working on the Digital Accessibility Framework. The content is a set of accessibility guidance statements that are intended collectively to address a wide range of functional and user needs. The statements are mapped to a matrix that helps us to determine where new accessibility needs need to be explored.
For most users, the matrix is the primary resource to explore. Understanding it requires understanding of the remainder of the site, so that is introduced first.
The W3C draft Framework for Accessible Specification of Technologies (FAST) defines the concepts of functional needs, intersection needs, and user needs that were adopted for this work:
- A functional need is a statement that describes a specific gap in one’s ability, or a specific mismatch between ability and the designed environment or context.
- An intersectional functional need results from an individual having more than one functional need simultaneously in a given context.
- A user need is a high level accessibility characteristic of content and/or a user interface that is necessary for users to complete an objective.
The team developed a set of functional needs that represents a broad set of needs within major categories such as sensory, mobility, etc. The functional needs are fairly generic, with the expectation that various specific needs may fit within the generic need. User needs mostly correspond to the “POUR” guidelines from WCAG, with some additions. These are also high level needs, which intersect with the functional needs to show a potential accessibility need for digitial content. The context of the user need is the type of content with which the user is engaging, which are called user need contexts. Some combinations of user need and context are non-sensical and have been marked as “NA”. As examples, one does not perceive a user input action by itself, or operate static content without controls, so there are no accessibility needs to define for such intersections. The functional needs, user needs, and user need contexts intersect in a 3-dimensional matrix of potential accessibility needs.
Accessibility needs are expressed as guidance statements. Guidance statements are short statements of the user’s specific functional need, and what accessibility accommodation will address this need. These statements are not technical and do not consider how the need might be met, they simply document the need. Each statement is mapped to one or more specific triples of functional need, user need, and user need context.
The matrix shows the guidance statements in cells according to their mappings. The matrix is reduced to 2 dimensions by repeating the user need contexts for each user need. Statements appear in all the cells for which they have mappings.
At the top of the table, there are some checkboxes to activate features to help explore the matrix:
- “Show cell position” adds a light shadow to all cells in the row and column over which the mouse is positioned, to help visually track the relationships expressed in the table.
- “Show same statements” changes the colour and weight of all instances of a given accessibility statement in the table, when the mouse is positioned over one of them.
- “Fit matrix” scales the table down to the width of the browser window. Doing this rather than browser sizing allows some readability optimizations. In browsers that support it, moving the mouse over a table cell with guidance statements will open a popover containing the contents of the cell displayed at the original font size.