*3.3.1 The outlying group who work online, remotely, and from home*

Greater percentage of this group are classified as able-bodied people without impairment. As such there is little, if any, sensitivity towards them in accessibility discourse. However, user research shows that they experience different types of impairment. Disability used to be defined only as a limiting condition which a person moves around with. Currently disability is defined more as a complex thing involving any pre-condition and the features of a person's environment, hence it is dependent on context [52]. The temporal and situational disability occurrence in the US, accounts for up to 21 million impaired persons yearly [52]. The Microsoft accessibility persona spectrum highlights that injuries and illnesses create temporary impairment. However, the situational impairment could arise due to anything within the environment which the person responds to. It could be due to a factor the person must accommodate to perform a task, or a situation between two persons. This type of impairment happens to people who are normally classified as non-disabled, turning them into disabled persons within a specific time interval, context, and situation. Essentially, just as with a permanent disability, the person who is situationally disabled, remains a disabled/impaired person for as long as the disabling situation and contextual features remain. The implication is that an appreciable amount of the able-bodied working population will experience some type of accessibility need at various intervals. Though more dynamic, that is an additional market share to exploit for business opportunities.

Therefore, universal design is encouraged in contemporary IT design. Designing for the worst-case scenario, or for the permanently disabled will essentially accommodate all other cases [52].

In addition, the more subtle aspect of disability is cognitive impairment, especially temporary and situational cognitive impairment. According to [53] it ranges from permanent to situational. See **Figure 4**. Here we highlight situational impairment, in Ref. to those working online remotely, especially those working from home. While the extremes have been presented here, there are other psychological levels that fall between the three key points presented under situational disability. All the possible cases can arise while working remotely from home, thereby creating situational needs for accessibility.

The user experience implications are that the situationally disabled person who needs access to a web site or an app, needs it immediately, and in that situation.

**Figure 4.** *Persona spectrum for cognitive disability [53].*

Usually, it is to perform a task that is needful within the same disabling situation. Therefore, they would move across e-services quickly to find the one that serves their purpose.

Furthermore, the user experience implications are substantiated by recent user research showing, that cognitive load is a major frustration for a lot of people working from home. They experience the need to multi-task and manage the friction between the home and the encroaching office environment [54]. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven up the adoption of work from home mode, which has prospects of increasing permanently [55]. Before the pandemic, about 80% of employees in the US wanted to work from home for some of their work time [56]. However, research also shows that those who work from home experience various levels of stress, which arguably, lead to increase in cognitive load [57]. Therefore, while most persons in the working population do not have any known impairments, the phenomenon of situational disability would create access needs for them, which could result in loss of opportunities for the e-businesses, which they are not able to access.
