Before You Design, Persona-fy

Improving your website’s accessibility makes it possible for all attendees –– including individuals with disabilities –– to engage with your content. 

To help you implement accessibility into your website development stage, the Office of Digital Accessibility created the Design Personas: Digital Accessibility Recommendations for Interactive Design guide. 

What are design personas?

A design persona is a fictional characterization of a segment of an audience. Think of personas as a tool for empathy, decision-making, and design. They’re intended to help content authors, designers, and service managers better understand the needs and motivations of their audience. 

This guide’s characters represent a spectrum of disabilities and permanent or situational impairments that you might consider when designing your website. 

More on this resource

The design persona guide provides:

• Persona examples representing users with different disabilities or needs, giving varied end-user experiences to consider when designing 
• Corresponding accessibility testing tips within each character example
• Additional resources to further your understanding of website accessibility tools and aid in design testing 

Check out the design persona guide today. 

About the Office of Digital Accessibility

Building on Stanford’s core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, ODA serves the greater Stanford community by providing technical guidance, accessibility reviews, evaluation tools, and training resources for realizing a more accessible information and communication technology environment.

Discover more

• Visit the Office of Digital Accessibility website.
• Explore guides to improve accessibility.
• View more accessibility best practices.
• Have questions? Sign up for accessibility office hours.