Accessibility is not a new topic for us at this point in the course but this week it felt more relevant than ever. The rise of AI and the influx of faster, less considered design methods has made it easier than ever to produce things quickly and harder than ever to produce them responsibly. Accessibility often gets treated as a minimum bar to clear rather than a standard to design toward from the start. Good teams take good accessibility as a given and build it in from the beginning rather than retrofitting it at the end.
Accessibility legislation is now in place and applies across a wide range of products including computers, phones, ATMs and ticketing machines. The requirement is that these products are operable, understandable and perceivable by everyone who needs to use them. Failure to comply is increasingly ending up in court, which reflects how seriously this is now being taken at a legal and institutional level. The statistic that landed hardest this week was that somewhere between 94.8 and 96.3% of websites are currently inaccessible. That is an extraordinary number and a significant indictment of how the industry has been prioritising its work.
The framework introduced for thinking about accessibility was POUR, which breaks down into four principles.
Perceivable means that if a user cannot see, hear or detect the content then they cannot use the product. Information should be available through more than one sense so that no single sensory channel is the only route to accessing what the product offers.
Operable means that users must be able to navigate and interact with the product regardless of their input method. A product that only works with a mouse, for example, excludes anyone using a keyboard, a switch device or any other assistive input tool.
Understandable means that users must be able to understand both the information and the interface itself. Content should be clear, predictable and easy to follow. Complexity that serves the designer rather than the user is an accessibility failure.
Robust means the product must work across different technologies, devices, browsers and assistive technologies. A design that only functions perfectly in one environment is a design that excludes everyone outside that environment.
Inclusive design sits alongside accessibility but operates differently. Where accessibility tends to focus on removing barriers for specific groups, inclusive design is more about how we work as designers. It asks us to consider a wider range of human experiences from the start rather than designing for a default user and accommodating others as an afterthought.
Practical expressions of inclusive design include multilingual interfaces, diverse imagery, multiple input models and flexible content formats. These are not edge case considerations. They are the baseline of designing for the real world.
The session included an exercise asking us to name five people we admire. My list was my girlfriend, my uncle, Lee Kuan Yew, Steve Jobs and Isaac Wood. The point of the exercise was to surface the diversity of people and experiences we are drawn to and to use that as a starting point for empathy. The story of Turri, who invented the typewriter to communicate with his deaf lover, was a powerful illustration of where some of the most meaningful design comes from. Necessity, empathy and a genuine desire to solve a real problem for a real person.
The how might we approach inclusive design question was framed around who, what, where, when, why and how, which is a useful checklist for ensuring you are not designing around assumptions about who your user is and how they live.
The principle of solve for one, extend to many was another key takeaway. When you design well for someone at the margins, the solution almost always improves the experience for everyone else too. Curb cuts were designed for wheelchair users and ended up benefiting cyclists, parents with pushchairs and delivery workers. The same logic applies to almost every accessibility intervention.
The session also touched on how increased mobility of technology has led to an increase in situational disability. Someone holding a coffee in one hand is temporarily a one handed user. Someone in bright sunlight cannot see their screen. Someone in a loud environment cannot hear audio. These are not permanent disabilities but they are real moments of exclusion that good design should account for.