Building for the (digital) Illiterate users

We are living in a society where we are praised for being smart. Smart people are the ones who get the best jobs, the best houses and the best cars. But what about the people who are not that smart? The people who struggle with reading, writing and understanding complex information?

For more than a decade I am building in-house software in a center for people with cognitive disabilities. People who are not able to read and write, people who are not able to understand complex information aren’t able to use a computer in a normal way.

Although those people don’t use apps and computers in the same way as most people do, in a digital world it is important that they can perform some digital tasks if they want to participate in a inclusive society. Since the years 2000 there is a disability inclusive approach that makes it possible for those people to stay away from specialized institutions and clinics. This is the way to go to give them the same quality of life as most people have.

In this talk I teach you how I build software to include those people. I will guide you to principles of color-by-function, images and iconography, text simplification, text-to-speech and tangibility. You’ll learn how to use those methodologies to build software that helps to include those wonderful people with cognitive disabilities.