Topics in Accessibility: Lightening the Cognitive Load

What is cognitive load?

Cognitive load is the amount of working memory your cognitive processor (you might refer to this as your brain) has to use to understand information and act on it. Cognitive load is generally lessened by use of schema, or patterns of thought/action, that make it easier to recall and reproduce that thought/action.

What are the different types of cognitive load?

There are three kinds of cognitive load.

Intrinsic cognitive load

This describes the brain capacity required to perform a task you have learned to complete with some frequency, or which is engrained to the extent it is easy to complete even after a period of time.

Germane cognitive load

Describes the development of schema and patterns to develop intrinsic cognitive load.

Extraneous cognitive load

This represents the unnecessary extra amounts of work your brain must do to reach information and thus understanding because of poorly designed systems and badly presented information. You want to execute a simple task but the way you are instructed to do it or find the necessary info is blocked again and again. If you have ever tried to exit a branch of Ikea from the centre of the store or navigated a recipe on a cookery blog, then you have experienced extraneous cognitive load.

What does this have to do with websites?

A lot of the info we have to access at Carleton are located on websites, so it is the responsibility of all of us who maintain Carleton sites to make sure we don’t contribute to the extraneous cognitive load.

It is at heart an accessibility issue. The more barriers we place in the way of easily recognizable patterns in the presentation of web content, the more we block accessibility for our site visitors who have a cognitive disability. But cognitive load is a great example of how accessibility experts are now saying that accessibility is for folk without chronic disabilities and how we should present content with other people in mind – from people with Long COVID to a sleep-deprived parent who has to navigate a healthcare website first thing in the morning.

What are some good examples?

A great illustration of how extraneous cognitive load can be a by-product of visiting a website is the navigation menu.

Imagine you are a prospective student visiting university websites to decide what you will study and at which institution. You arrive on the website of a university and click on the link to their Chemistry Department website. You see several links in the left-hand nav menu:

About us

News

Prospective Students

Current Students

Research

As a prospective student, you click on the obvious link, read some information, perhaps make a couple of notes, and then move on to the next area in which you are interested – Mechanical Engineering. Here you see the Prospective Students link again, click on it, and gather the information you need.

You click on three more departments and do the same.

Very rapidly you have developed some germane cognitive load – you know where to click when you land on a site to find prospective student info.

Until you don’t. The next site you land on is not in the University-owned templates provided by Web Services, so things are a little weird already. But when you look at the navigation menu, you see

News

Faculty

Staff

Grad Students

Undergrad Students

Research

(To learn more about ordering your menu in an easily memorable way, read the article What’s on the Menu? Tips for Building Effective Website Navigation by Charlie Ham).

It’s obvious that such a situation will quickly add to the load, and that that added cognitive processing is wholly unnecessary!

How can we remove extraneous cognitive load?

The main way is to present information in a consistent way. These are the top ways to achieve this:

Use a Carleton template (CCMS or Framework but soon these will merge into one template, cuTheme) – so much more becomes consistent once you take that step. Thankfully, 99% of departmental sites already do!
Use the templated content within the site. Examples of this include the People profiles – if you use these then someone visiting various faculty profiles will automatically know where on the page to find their email address, for example.
Write content using the inverse pyramid model. This means putting the most important content first on a page where possible. That way people hunting for the essential info know where to find it more often than not
Use buttons for calls to action or crucial links (e.g., Apply Now, or Get Help – not Find out More Info or Learn about the Department)
Re-order your menu! See above! Look at other departments – are you using a pattern similar to a lot of other departments, or have you gone rogue??
Organize content within a page to make it easier to access.

More information

And don’t forget that you can also visit our online resources and take self-guided training on accessibility.

Now I am off to consult a recipe blog on how to make French toast. I should be back in three days.