No matter where you learnt to be a designer: from a university degree, self taught or years in industry, there is a good chance you made it to the world of being a professional designer without ever having encountered accessibility. Even for those who have, they often only have a very vague idea of what this entails, something to do with colour contrast and screen readers? Even though accessibility is woefully under taught in the design world, it it one of the keys to creating a truely great experience for all of your users.

[On accessibility at university] It was a very strange revelation for me. I thought it was peculiar that my very lovely and intelligent tutors talked so much about empathy, design thinking, and focusing on the user, but didn’t prepare me to think about the users who are often left out of the equation. — Monica Regalado

What is accessible design?

User experience is more than if your product offers base functionality to users, it’s more than if they can technically access your website or application. It’s about ensuring that no matter what the circumstances of a particular user may be, that their end to end experience of interacting with your design is a seamless, intuitive and delightful one.

User’s interact with websites and applications in many different ways for example some people may use screen readers — software on a phone or computer that reads content out loud. There are many different reasons people use screen readers including blindness, low vision and low literacy. Other users may navigate through your design using only a keyboard, or through the use of a customised keyboard with only a few buttons. Sometimes they do this simply because it’s more convenient, like when you tab through elements in a form field rather than using a mouse. Other times it’s because users have difficulty physically operating a mouse and a keyboard is more practical.

People will experience the designs you create in many different ways for many different reasons, because every user has a different context. An example of accessible design that you may have encounter before is subtitles which are used for different reasons including:

In loud places like cafes where audio may be hard to hear

In places where there is a need to preserve a quiet atmosphere like a doctor’s waiting room

When a TV show or film is in a language the user isn’t fluent in

When a user has some level of hearing loss

So while accessibility sometimes refers to people with profound disabilities, it’s not the whole picture. Accessibility is better explained as empathising with the wide set of circumstances that users experience the world through and creating products that meet these needs. It is very likely that you fall into these categories multiple times every day as you navigate the world through an ever changing set of contexts.

However it is important to remember that disability is never just an edge case and out of 7.5 billion people in this world, over 1 billion have a disability. When you create products that do not meet accessibility standards, your designs create second-class citizens that are locked out from accessing part of the world. However those 1 in 7 people are not the only ones who benefit when you make your designs accessible. Accessibility makes design better for all your users. For example an application that uses a high contrast colour palette is not only visible to people with low vision, but it also means your website is still readable outside on a bright sunny day.