Accessibility and usability issues are of particular importance when designing technologies to people and people with cognitive disabilities. Cognitively disabled people have difficulties interpreting what is seen or heard and/or difficulties making mental connections between different pieces of information, or have trouble with abstract reasoning.

The design principles that have been identified as important, and applied in the accessibility design of the Mylife user interfaces are:

1. Enable gradual simplification.
2. Enable direct manipulation.
3. Offer alternative modalities.
4. Simplify the language.
5. Make visualisations relevant.
6. Enable alternative presentation styles.
7. Model real world artefacts and their behaviour.
8. Make it easy to start from the beginning.
9. Acknowledge external communication.
10. Let the users be users.

Page updated 31.7.2012