How to design cognitively accessible digital design patterns for booking tickets: A participative study with Easy-to-Read users.
Sabina Sieghart, Björn Rohles, Kim Corti, Trang Nguyen, Ann Bessemans · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790838
Summary
Sieghart and colleagues tackle a persistent gap in cognitive accessibility research: digital design patterns are almost never validated with Easy-to-Read (ETR) users — adults with intellectual disabilities who can read at a basic level. The paper reports a participatory design and evaluation case study built around a realistic, ecologically valid task: choosing a play, picking a date, and ordering tickets from a local Munich theater on a smartphone. The authors ran three workshops with four ETR co-researchers to surface needs, pain points, and real-world workarounds, then integrated a professional UX designer into the process to translate those findings into industry-quality Figma prototypes using the theater's actual corporate identity. The evaluation tested three UI variants for event selection, three for date selection, and two ordering flows (with and without a stepper) against WCAG 2.2 and COGA guidance. 43 ETR users and 12 university-student controls completed three experiments on a Samsung Galaxy A12, with sessions video/audio recorded, reading level measured via the lea diagnostic tool, and data analysed with a triangulated grounded-theory approach in MAXQDA plus statistical tests (McNemar, Kruskal-Wallis, Fisher's exact). The paper contributes a UX-enhanced PD process, a detailed context-of-use portrait, and concrete recommendations for buttons, cards, lists, scrolling, swiping, and order steppers tailored to ETR users but broadly useful for anyone designing consumer flows.
Key findings
Context of use differs sharply from typical assumptions: 100% of both groups owned smartphones (Android-heavy in the test group), but only 21% of ETR users shopped online regularly versus 92% of controls, and only 5% had ever bought a ticket online. Guardianship, low budgets, fear of mistakes, and data-security worries — not interface usability alone — drove much of this gap. On the design patterns themselves, image-rich card variants (B) and text-on-image slider variants (C) substantially outperformed purely typographic cards (A): in Experiment 2, 'yes' success jumped from 53% (A) to 79% (C) for ETR users. Abundant button design (icon + short text + distinct color per function) yielded 100% success on the primary ticket button. Swiping worked for all but one participant despite WCAG 2.2 guidance against bidirectional scrolling — familiarity with Instagram (39%) and Photos likely drove this. The stepper was preferred as a progress indicator. Linguistic barriers (the play title 'LÄUFT') caused confusion even in controls. The qualitative analysis identified seven ETR user types (fearful, lazy, child, reluctant, adventurous, independent, cash) whose divergent strategies make any single 'ETR UI' inadequate.
Relevance
For practitioners, this is one of the rare studies that validates concrete, named UI design patterns with a sizeable ETR sample in a realistic end-to-end flow rather than a stripped-down lab task. The pattern-level recommendations — text on images, abundant buttons with icons, steppers in multi-step flows, autofill in contact forms, banknote icons for payment options — translate directly into ticketing, booking, and checkout designs. Equally important, the paper exposes sociotechnical barriers (guardianship, payment access, fear of irreversible purchases) that pure usability work cannot solve, and argues that WCAG and COGA guidance, while necessary, is too abstract to drive ETR-specific decisions on its own. The UX-enhanced participatory design process is a methodological contribution teams can reuse: lightweight, ethically approved, and producing industry-quality prototypes. Limitations include the Figma prototype (no real zoom, autofill, or search), a single use case, and the risk that future GenAI and agentic-commerce interfaces may reopen risks the design patterns here mitigate.
Tags: cognitive accessibility · Easy-to-Read · intellectual disability · participatory design · digital design patterns · usability · inclusion · user study · interaction design · e-commerce accessibility
Standards referenced: WCAG 2.2 · COGA · ISO 9241-210 · European Accessibility Act · DIN SPEC 33429