Introducing the CollectivAlly personas

At the heart of CollectivAlly are personas.

These are AI personas powered by lived experience data, built to show how disabled and neurodivergent people actually navigate and use digital services. Every persona is grounded in real research, not guesswork or assumptions.

They are not designed to speak for entire communities. Instead, they shine a light on the many different ways people access digital services, so your team can spot where barriers are showing up in practice rather than just against a technical checklist.

Focusing on how people use digital services

One of the most common challenges with accessibility is that it gets framed around conditions rather than experiences.

Teams are often asked to recruit a blind user, or a deaf user, or a user with dyslexia. These categories can be useful as a starting point, but they can quietly steer us towards a simplified view of what it actually means to use a service.

What really matters is whether the service works.

• Can it be used without sight?
• Does it still hold together when zoomed in?
• Can someone complete a journey without ever touching a mouse?
• Is the content clear enough to understand without relying on complex language?

The CollectivAlly personas are built around exactly these kinds of questions. Each one reflects a distinct way of interacting with digital services, shaped by different input methods, output needs and patterns of use.

• Aisha navigates without sight, using a screen reader and keyboard.
• Daniel zooms, adjusts contrast and may not perceive colour clearly.
• Sofia is a Deaf BSL-first user who relies on captions and written communication.
• Marcus uses voice control because using his hands is difficult.
• Hannah navigates entirely by keyboard.
• Lewis benefits from clear, structured content due to dyslexia and ADHD.
• Priya is sensitive to motion and unpredictability.
• Michael experiences a combination of changes in vision, hearing, strength and stamina.

Together, they reflect a range of the ways people access digital services every single day.

This approach also acknowledges something important: accessibility is not only about permanent disability. Many of us encounter situational or temporary barriers at different points in our lives, and by focusing on outcomes rather than conditions, we can design for everyone more effectively.

Focusing on outcome, not condition

When we started developing the CollectivAlly personas, we reviewed the GDS accessibility personas as our foundation. As the work progressed, it became clear that a stronger focus on outcomes would serve teams better in practice.

That meant thinking less about categorising users and more about what a service actually needs to support.

This shift reflects the direction accessibility standards are moving in. The European Accessibility Act, for example, focuses on whether a product can be used across different ways of seeing, hearing, understanding and interacting. Our personas have been shaped with that same perspective in mind, mapped to the EAA functional performance criteria, and designed to bring these outcomes to life in a way that feels immediate and real.

A social model perspective

This approach is rooted in the social model of disability.

People are not disabled by their condition alone. They are disabled when products and services are designed without their needs in mind.

• A form that can only be completed with a mouse.
• A video with no captions.
• A layout that breaks apart when zoomed.

These are design decisions that create barriers. And they can be changed.

By focusing on how people interact with services, the CollectivAlly personas help teams identify exactly where those barriers exist and what needs to shift. The emphasis moves away from who the user is and towards what the service needs to do.

Personas support research. They do not replace it.

The conversation about the role of personas in accessibility is an important one, and it is ongoing.

There is no substitute for research with real participants. Lived experience is complex, contextual and deeply personal. A persona cannot fully capture that, and we would never suggest otherwise.

What CollectivAlly does is bridge a gap. Many organisations are not conducting inclusive research at all right now. Decisions get made based on internal assumptions or automated testing alone, and that leaves a lot of people behind.

By introducing lived-experience-informed perspectives into the process, we can change the starting point. Teams begin to think differently. Barriers that would otherwise be invisible start to surface. Accessibility gets closer to real human experience. And when organisations are ready to work with real participants, that testing becomes more focused, more productive and a better use of everyone’s time.

Bringing people back into the process

Accessibility can easily shrink down to a compliance exercise. Standards matter, but on their own they do not help teams understand what it actually feels like to use a service.

The CollectivAlly personas are here to bring that perspective back in. They are not perfect and they are not exhaustive. But they do create space for teams to consider different ways of interacting, different needs and different experiences.

That shift changes the kinds of questions that get asked, and the decisions that follow.

And that is where more inclusive digital experiences begin.