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I’m still in vacation mode, having hosted a 70th birthday party for my dad, and then spending my birthday (yesterday) with my family at the Shedd Aquarium. Thus, this post will be short and sweet.

One of the ways in which accessibility work can help your organization better understand its products and services is in defining usage scenarios and task flows to consume those services. Abstracting away the peculiarities of an interface—be it web 1.0 or AJAX, voice or kiosk—requires you to understand the process and factors that impact task completion and satisfaction.
I’ve been playing with the idea of what I call an “equivalence matrix” to represent different contexts, modes, and scenarios in which a task may be completed. In an ideal world, you’d have a taskflow, let’s say ‘pay the cable bill’. In the matrix, for each persona you’d have a scenario and distinct, use case information about how they would complete the task. If you already had existing use cases, this would become a fill in the blanks exercise for the new personas you’re considering, in this case, that of people with disabilities or technological limitations.

This idea sounded much better a cup of coffee ago, but I’m letting it into the wild anyway. Anyone ever dealt with this? Done something like it? Drop a comment and let me know…