Accessible web interfaces are crucial for the inclusion and independence of all groups in society. Cognitive accessibility aims to make content more accessible for individuals with cognitive disabilities, such as people with learning disabilities (e.g. dyslexia, dysgraphia) and age-related disabilities (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer's disease). It is hard to tell exactly how many people are affected by barriers on the web due to inaccessibility, however, cognitive accessibility is affecting all users on the web to some extent. With an overrepresentation in accessibility research regarding sensory disabilities such as visual or hearing impairments, there is a need for further research on cognitive disabilities. Moreover, there is a lack of research in specific sectors (e.g., commerce, health), solutions anchored in real-world experiences affecting people with cognitive disabilities (PwCDs) and inclusion of PwCDs in the design process for web accessibility. As a contribution, this study aims to investigate the cognitive accessibility in the checkout part of e-commerce websites, adopting a form of a participative design approach. As such, a prototype of a fictive e-commerce website adopting cognitive accessibility was designed along with a counterexample prototype. The prototypes were presented to the target audience in an interaction study, featuring several tasks to evaluate the prototypes. The results showed that the prototype adopting cognitive accessibility was favoured by the users, based on the findings from the collected data. This study concludes that adopting cognitive accessibility to a web interface of the checkout on an e-commerce website is beneficial and perceived as easier to use.

Studien fokuserar på huruvida WCAG:s kompletterande riktlinjer för de med kognitiv funktionsnedsättning möter de behov som utmärks hos barn mellan 10–16 år med ADHD.  Digitaliseringen har bidragit till att tillgängligheten av gränssnitt blivit allt viktigare, inte minst för barn med kognitiva funktionsnedsättningar. Under de senaste 15 åren har andelen personer som diagnostiserats med ADHD ökat. Litteratur visar att barn i skolåldern med ADHD upplever ett överflöd av akademiska och pedagogiska problem. Detta medför att barnet sannolikt kommer att upplevas för hårt behandlad, vilket i sin tur kan påverka självkänslan. Personer med funktionsnedsättningar kan dessutom ofta uppleva svårigheter som leder till funktionshinder på grund av samhällets struktur. Digitala lösningar är en del av en sådan exkluderande struktur, om de inte är utformade för att vara tillgängliga för personer med funktionsnedsättningar. Idealet är att uppnå en universell design: en lösning som kan användas av vem som helst utan behov av anpassning eller kompromiss, en design för alla.  Denna studie bidrar till att kartlägga vilka behov barn med ADHD har och skapar en förståelse kring hur WCAG:s riktlinjer fångar upp dessa behov. Detta har undersökts genom studiens undersökningsmodell som kopplar samman barn med ADHD:s behov med WCAG:s kognitiva riktlinjer.  Resultat och slutsats grundas på litteratur, undersökningsmodellen och semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultatet av studien visar vikten i att vidareutveckla undersökningsmodellen för att sträva mot ett ramverk som kan vägleda till att skapa en webbplats som är tillgänglighetsanpassad för barn med ADHD.  Således talas det om teoretiska implikationer som presenterar det teoretiska bidraget som studien medfört. Därefter redovisas praktiska implikationer där designförslag ges för att i högre utsträckning inkludera barn med ADHD:s behov. Slutsatsen är att WCAG:s kompletterande riktlinjer för att inkludera individer med kognitiva funktionsnedsättningar är relevanta för att uppnå en tillgänglighet för barn med ADHD. Däremot visar studien på att de befintliga riktlinjerna inte räcker till utan behöver kompletteras med ytterligare riktlinjer för att bemöta barn med ADHD:s behov. Undersökningsmodellen bör valideras och vidareutvecklas ytterligare, men denna studie bidrar med en grund att bygga vidare på inför fortsatt forskning. / This study focuses on how WCAG:s supplemental guidelines for those with cognitive impairment meet the needs of children between 10-16 years with ADHD.  The digitalization in society has contributed to the fact that accessibility in interfaces has become increasingly important, not least for children with cognitive impairments. During the past 15 years, the amount of people diagnosed with ADHD has increased. Literature shows that school-aged children with ADHD experience an abundance of academic and pedagogical problems. This means that the child will probably feel too harshly treated, which later can affect the child's self-esteem. People with impairments can often experience difficulties that lead to disability due to the structure of society. Digital solutions are a part of such an exclusive structure, if they are not designed to be accessible to people with impairments. The ideal is to achieve universal design: a solution that can be used by anyone without the need for adaptation or compromise, a design for all.  This study helps to identify the needs of children with ADHD and contributes with an understanding of how WCAG's guidelines capture these needs. This has been investigated through the study's investigation model that connects the needs of children with ADHD with the cognitive accessibility guidelines from WCAG:s. The results and conclusions are based on literature, the investigation model and semi structured interviews. The results of the study shows the importance of further development of the investigation model, in order to strive for a framework that can guide the design of a website to be accessible to children with ADHD. Further presented are theoretical implications that present the theoretical contribution that the study entailed, as well as practical implications where design proposals are given to further include children with ADHD's needs. The conclusion of the study is that WCAG's supplemental guidelines for including individuals with cognitive disabilities are relevant for achieving accessibility for children with ADHD. On the other hand, the study shows that the existing guidelines are not sufficient and need to be supplemented with additional guidelines to include the needs of children with ADHD. The investigation model should be validated and further developed, but this study has contributed with a foundation for additional research.

Since the start of 2019 a new law has been introduced in Sweden, it serves to regulate web accessibility conformity for all publicly funded organisations. At the same time, many services and businesses move their physical fronts to the web. With more digitalization comes a greater need for web accessibility and there might be a risk that users with cognitive disabilities are neglected or forgotten when new and advanced tools and technologies are developed. Accessibility often receives low or no priority in the private sector due to the lack of time and resources. Cognitive disabilities do not always show and there is a risk that the difficulties are not taken into account when services or webpages are developed. These disabilities can affect areas such as the ability to learn new things, memory and the ability to plan one's actions. The purpose of this study is to investigate if there is any knowledge and experience among Swedish developers concerning accessibility, cognitive disabilities and the needs those individuals might have. To perform this study the needs had to be identified and connected to the standard that acts as a base for the new Swedish law. For this purpose, theory was gathered through a literature study as a foundation for a qualitative study consisting of a series of interviews with developers from six different organisations in the Swedish private sector. The interview subjects were selected from different organisations so that their views and opinions would not be affected by one and other for the purpose of increasing the studies generalizability. The interviews were held at locations selected by the interviewees by two different interviewers. The result from the literature study showed that there was no direct support for cognitive disabilities in the standard, but there are guidelines that could be applied to some of the needs identified in the study. Furthermore, the results of the interviews showed that the general knowledge and experience concerning accessibility and specifically cognitive accessibility is very low among Swedish developers. This study is aimed towards people working with development but is also suitable for students and teachers who wish to know more about accessibility and cognitive accessibility.

Tillgängligt innehåll på webben är uppmärksammat sedan länge inom webbutveckling. Kognitiv tillgänglighet innebär att innehållet även är tillgängligt för användare med en kognitiv funktionsnedsättning. En person med kognitiv funktionsnedsättning har nedsatt förmåga att ta in och bearbeta information. Exempel på svårigheter är koncentration, inlärning eller minnesproblem. Många människor pratar om kognitiv funktionsnedsättning i termer som ADHD och andra vanligt förekommande diagnoser i kategorin. Dock händer det inte ofta att webbutvecklare talar om kognitiv funktionsnedsättning i diskussioner om tillgänglighet på webben. Detta kan anses märkligt eftersom kognitiva funktionsnedsättningar är mer vanligt än de fysiska funktionsnedsättningar som tillgänglighet oftast syfar till. Riktlinjerna WCAG 2.0 är framtagna för att möta alla användares behov men upplevs vara otillräckliga för att möta kognitiv tillgänglighet. Denna studie lyfter fram vilka kognitiva behov som finns på webben och riktlinjerna WCAG 2.0 granskas utifrån de behov som definierats. I denna och även i tidigare studier kan vi se att användare med kognitiv funktionsnedsättning behöver rättstavningshjälp, igenkännbart innehåll, textuppläsning och att slippa se popup-rutor och blinkande eller rörligt innehåll. Riktlinjer som möter dessa behov är bland annat riktlinje 10 om förutsägbart innehåll och riktlinje 11 om inmatningsstöd. Där det saknas riktlinjer för att möta kognitiva behov finns istället utvecklade hjälpmedel som stödjer olika kognitiva behov. Exempel på ett sådant hjälpmedel är Chrome-tillägget AdBlock som blockerar popup-rutor. Resultatet i denna studie visar att riktlinjerna faktiskt är tillräckligt bra och med hjälp av befintliga hjälpmedel möter de alla kognitiva behov. / Accessible web content is a familiar concept since many years. It has a fundamental purpose of making web content useful for everyone regardless of abilities. Cognitive accessibility imply that the content is also accessible for people with cognitive disabilities. Difficulty with mental tasks such as memory, problem-solving and attention is one definition of cognitive disability. It’s common to talk about cognitive disabilities in terms of diagnosis like ADHD and others. Despite the fact that accessibility and cognitive disabilities are highlighted terms apart, the compound term cognitive accessibility is not that very highlighted among web developers while discussing web accessibility. This can be considered odd since cognitive disabilities are more frequent then other physical disabilities. Te accessibility guidelines WCAG 2.0 are produced with its purpose of describing guidelines for making web content accessible for all users. These guidelines are perceived insufficient where cognitive needs are concerned. Tis study emphasizes what cognitive needs there currently are and the guidelines WCAG 2.0 are criticized towards the emphasized cognitive needs. In this study and other studies cognitive needs have been defined such as spellchecker, recognizable content, text to speech and the need of avoiding popups and blinking or moving content. There are guidelines to answer for those needs. Two of these guidelines are Guideline 10 and 11 where Guideline 10 is about predictable content and Guideline 11 is about input support. Where cognitive needs are not answered by any guidelines, there are many tools for cognitive needs available. One tool of such quality is the Chrome extension AdBlock for user to block content such as popups or ads. According to the results of this study, the guidelines WCAG 2.0 are actually good enough and together with available tools they answer for all cognitive needs.