Cognitive Accessibility Review: The Barriers You Cannot Screenshot

What We Keep Finding

Some barriers do not look like anything. A form that wipes itself after one wrong field. An error saying "invalid input" and stopping there. A code you are meant to memorize on one screen and retype on the next, which WCAG 2.2 added a whole new rule about because it comes up so often. For people with ADHD, dyslexia, a memory condition or a brain injury, these are not annoyances. They are walls. And honestly, they tax every other visitor too, just more quietly.

Two things make this the least-audited corner of the standard, and both are worth knowing before you buy. The first is that WCAG says so itself. Its own introduction records that significant challenges were met in writing criteria for cognitive, language and learning disabilities, and that content conforming at the highest level still will not reach everyone in those groups. The second is that automation has almost nothing here. The guideline covering labels, error identification, error suggestion and error prevention has one published test rule across its nine criteria, and that one is still a proposal. So the part of the standard that governs whether a form makes sense is the part no scanner reaches.

So most audits skip the review and ours does not. We walk your journeys asking the plain questions. Is it clear what to do? Does the site behave the same way twice? And when something goes wrong, can a person recover without starting over?