Consider adding a persona "non-native speakers with limited language skills

[fsasaki]

Section 6
https://www.w3.org/TR/2020/WD-coga-usable-20200717/#persona

The document provides very useful material, including all user stories and related design guides.
We assume that the document may also be useful for an additional persona "non-native speakers with limited language skills".

Such a persona includes people who have not cognitive learning disabilities per se, but only in a given situation. They are living in a foreign country and have poor language skills for the local language. This situation can occur to anybody, and world wide, more and more people are in such a situation.

Adding such a persona could help to find an even wider audience for the document, who are in need for the guidance provided here.

If the comment is accepted in general, we would be happy to provide a description of the new persona.

[rachaelbradley]

Thank you for the suggestion. We will address this in the next version but feel we need to do more research before adding this.

[JaninaSajka]

This is a good catch and worthy of followup. We have sometimes called similar circumstances "situational disabilities." Most persons who encounter disabling circumstances in certain situations would not consider themselves disabled, though it's clear that being an immigrant in a country where the predominant language is not one's own native language may indeed described a rather long-lived situational disability.
During the development of HTML5 in W3C the HTML Accessibility Task Force identified Time Scale Modification (TSM) as an important accessibility feature in our Media Accessibility User Requirements (MAUR) W3C Note publication for just such situations. It would be helpful to see greater uptake of TSM in user agents, e.g. to enable people to slow down the playing of a newscast. My quick search revealed various projects and some potential patents, but relatively nothing immediately usable in end user agents which is unfortunate, imo. Combining TSM slow down with onscreen word highlighting, as often used in certain learning situations, could significantly aid literacy acquisition, imo.n

[rainbreaw]

Following up and re-tagging this issue so that we can properly track it for version 2 of Content Usable.

Moving a couple of relevant comments from #246 which should also be tracked in this issue:

On March 3, 2020, @fsasaki commented:

The text does not address the comment #162 , to consider adding a persona "non-native speaker with limited language skills". I have added a suggestion for such a persona to the google docs document. Looking forward to your feedback.

On March 9, 2020, @lseeman commented:

Adding a new persona, and following up with the user needs, gap analysis, solutions etc is a lot work and research. We also feel that it is a bit out of scope (as being a non-native speaker is not technically a disability). However we are hoping to make a second version. We may included issues around accessibility for learning and cognitive disabilities in different cultures and languages. So we can consider adding a persona and user needs for non-native speakers then.

[rachaelbradley]

I am not sure Making Content Usable is the correct place for this persona. My concern with including it within the COGA space is that there is often (at least in my experience) an inocrrect unconscious or conscious bias that non-native speakers have a cognitive or learning disability or are generally less intelligent. Placing the persona here may perpetuate that bias.

I think it may be better in the WAI persona set and then reference the relevant best practices from Making Content Usable.