Task Completion & Emotional Disabilites

INITAL DRAFT

This document an issue paper looking into the challenges and issues faced by users with emotional disabilities when completing online tasks.

This is part of a series of issue papers written by The Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force (COGA). COGA is a joint Task Force of the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG).

Task-focused UIs are key components for engaing with Many Websites. Common tasks include:

• Online purchases and transactions
• creating and managing user profiles
• Completing individual lessons as part of an online course
• Any other examples?

Challenges for People with Emotional Disabilities

Task completion can be problematic for this user group particularly when the task requires the user to execute multiple steps over the course of multiple screens.

Task completion may be problematic for users experiencing:

• Anxiety around not executing tasks correctly
• Anxiety around privacy
• Anxiety around not executing tasks correctly
• >User with depression who have difficulty with task completion due to apathy

Proposed solutions

1. Task flow indicates the user's current location in the task flow.
2. Task flow indicates the user’s previous and next activity.
3. Provide mechanisms for receiving online and/or human help.
4. Provide a mechanism for users to change, update or delete input.
5. When appropriate, if a task is timed, provide a mechanism to extend, the amount of time givent to execute a task. WCAG 2.0 SC 2.2.1 Timing Adjustable SC
6. When appropriate, provide a mechanism for reminding a user if a task or process has not been completed