About

Lived Experience

As someone with low vision, ADHD, and a trauma-informed perspective, I've navigated digital systems as both a creator and a user. My own disability stack brought layered complexity: ADHD, a congenital and non-apparent disability I developed workaround for; low vision, an acquired and dynamic disability with a slow onset; and trauma, which shaped how I move through the world psychologically and socially.

Adapting to a fluctuating disability and forming my disability identity gave me a lens to recognize shared access patterns. These spectrums of experience became the foundation for the Disability Characteristics Model, which ultimately evolved into the Personatypes framework.

Community Conversations

Informal but powerful dialogue with disabled peers, advocates, and practitioners helped shape this work. While not a formal study, Personatypes reflects recurring themes of mismatch, adaptation, creativity, and frustration that emerged across many lived experiences.

Expert Reviews

The original draft was reviewed by Kathleen Bogart, Becca Lory Hector, and Dr. Annalise Ophelian. Their insights were invaluable—surfacing additional characteristics, identifying language that could be triggering, and calling attention to an early bias toward normative cognitive function. Their feedback helped ensure the framework is more inclusive, affirming, and psychologically safe.

UX and Accessibility Practice

With over 15 years in various design roles, I've seen how teams often struggle to translate WCAG into meaningful design decisions. Again and again, I've found that when we start with human needs—and understand why those needs exist—we naturally move closer to accessibility conformance. While personas help teams empathize, Personatypes go further. They offer a system for capturing nuance, variability, and identity that personas typically flatten or overlook.

Research & Toolkits

This work builds on, and diverges from, resources like Microsoft's Inclusive Design Toolkit, the UK Government's Accessibility Persona Spectrum Cards, and academic research on disability dimensions. These were important foundations—but Personatypes seeks to add what they often leave out: temporality, evolving identity, psychological safety, and emotional access.

Design Considerations

The design considerations for each Personatype were developed by mapping common access issues against recurring digital patterns—like onboarding, input methods, and task flows—and cross-checking them with themes I've seen across organizations. They also reflect insights from my own experience, conversations with disabled peers, and the nuanced challenges that often fall outside compliance checklists. Each set is meant to help teams move from understanding to action by bridging human need with practical design decisions.