While I’ve heard talk of other accessibility professionals creating personas with disabilities, it’s more rare to find actual examples flexible enough to adapt to other projects. In my work at the VA, particularly in Veteran-facing environments, factoring in major disabilities was key to accessible and usable experiences.

To that end, I created myself a persona template that included a ripped motif at the foot, implying that something more could be connected. And of course, the missing piece could be chosen from any of a large set of permanent, temporary or situational disabilities.

I found that including information on the prevalence and impact of each of these “mix-ins”, as I ended up calling them, helped convince stakeholders and team members to consider the possibilities more seriously; including specifics on assistive technologies and pain points helped other designers who were not accessibility subject matter experts approach their work with a more careful mindset.