From an accessibility/localization stand point, icons+text everywhere seems to be ideal.

Also, I disagree with:

> This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space”

Sure, that does technically happen, but is in no way preventative or mutually exclusive with the follow on thought:

> Does ... the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?

That still happens, because if they mismatch an icon with text, that can result in far worse cognitive load/misunderstanding than if no icon was present at all. This becomes readily apparent in his follow on thought experiment where you show someone a menu with icons+text, but "censor" the text. Icons+text is also superior to [occasionally icons]+text in the same thought experiment. From my perspective, the author just argued against their own preference there.

I'd argue that the thought process behind determining an appropriate icon is even more important and relevant when being consistent and enforcing icon+text everywhere, not diminished. It also has the broadest possible appeal (to the visual/graphically focused, to the literary focused, to those who either may not speak the language, and/or to those who are viewing the menu with a condensed/restrictive viewport that doesn't have room for the full text). Now, if the argument is predicated on "We aren't willing to pay a designer for this" then yeah, they have a point. Except they used Apple as an example so, doubt that was the premise.

I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page).

We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:

1) Those that use interface items with text 2) Those that use interface items with icons 3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.

I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.

If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)

After my stroke 3 years ago, I find myself in a place meeting accessibility. So the icons are helpful. I cannot necessarily read the text.

Yes, I agree. Maybe if you’re a fast reader icons don’t do much, but for people who are illiterate (20% of America) they figure out how to use tech by memorizing the icons and locations of buttons.

But also from an accessibility stand point, providing users with affordances to remove distractions (animations, transitions, and yes, icons) should be an option. But I disagree with the author that the default should be less icons.

I feel like icons subconsciously turn O(n*m) into O(log n).

Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.

Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.

But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.