HMRC’s Digital Inclusion and Accessibility Standards team have created and adapted the
GDS accessibility personas for use within our department as part of our accessibility awareness raising work.
Each persona has different access needs. They are:
- Claudia – a sight impaired screen magnifier user
- Ashleigh – a severely sight impaired screen reader user
- Ron – an older user with multiple conditions
- Chris – a user with rheumatoid arthritis
- Pawel – an autistic user
- Simone – a dyslexic user
- Saleem – a profoundly deaf user
- Helena – a user with dyscalculia
You can use these personas to experience the web from different perspectives and gain more understanding of accessibility issues people face.
Each persona’s page has a basic introduction to the personas and includes a training task.
Caveats
A simulation is never a true representation of an impairment. It’s only a tool trying to make some things roughly as difficult for someone without that impairment.
Some personas require using assistive technology, for the purpose of these examples it’s ok to use the tools that are built-in to the operating system. For testing real services you should use the technology supported in the service manual.
Disclaimer about accessibility
The purpose of each task is to demonstrate the issues people may face when using poorly written websites. These pages have been coded in a way to make it difficult, if not impossible, to correctly complete the task.
Users are expected to only need to use the tools as defined under the ‘Required assistive technology’ section on each of the individuals personas introduction page. Users that require further assistive technology to access the web may not be able to experience or interact with the tasks as intended.
