By Sarah Horton and David Sloan — As someone designing and building digital products, you have a responsibility to avoid introducing barriers that might inhibit or prevent disabled people from using digital products. We can think about digital accessibility as an intentional effort to meet our responsibility for avoiding creating products that exclude some users. The danger of a focus on legal compliance is that it can lead to bare‑minimum efforts to satisfy the letter of a law, or tick off items on a checklist, without true engagement with solving a design challenge in the most effective way. Thankfully, we can also think about accessibility as an opportunity to engineer better digital products for disabled people and for a broader audience.
Inclusive Design
The principles and practices of designing for diversity are referred to as inclusive design and involve a focus on understanding diverse user needs and diverse interaction methods. Adopting a practice of inclusive design means improving quality and usability for all users, especially groups who have historically experienced exclusion and discrimination, whether that is due to race, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, disability, age, religious beliefs, or a range of other characteristics.
Since our focus is on disability, it’s helpful to realize that an intentional focus on addressing the needs of people with disabilities can provide inspiration and insights that lead to new and innovative products benefiting a broad audience. Accessibility knowledge and skills can provide a path toward interesting employment. An inclusive design practice focuses attention on the needs of people, helps improve product quality, and matures your professional practice—so the practice of inclusive design is something we’ll return to regularly in this book.
Quality
Accessibility is a quality attribute, and inclusive design improves quality. If a supposed inclusive design process leads to a reduction in quality for some users, then that’s not true inclusion. The way you design and engineer solutions to accommodate diversity can lead to products that are more resilient, more robust, and more flexible in how they are used. The characteristics of an accessible digital product align well with other objectives that may be seen as priorities for the product, for example:
- Many principles of accessible web and document design are also recognized as supporting search engine optimization (SEO), as accessible digital documents tend to have the semantic information and alternatives for non‑text content that enable effective indexing.
- Accessibility best practices can also help address challenges relating to low‑bandwidth access, catering as they do to situations where a user does not have access to images or multimedia and encouraging the use of native user interface elements over elaborately scripted custom elements. In turn, this helps create digital products that have more global usage prospects, including for people who do not have access to high‑end devices and robust data connections.
- Mobile‑friendly design has significant overlap with accessible design—the usability challenges that a smaller screen and touchscreen input can present can, to a significant extent, be addressed by the same design best practices that address visual, cognitive, and dexterity limitations.
Innovation
The nature of accessibility’s focus on accommodating diversity in input and output channels, and in interaction methods and environments, brings opportunities to create digital products that can be used in new and often unexpected ways and that are more robust and resilient when used in constraining situations. A focus on accessibility brings process adjustments that can also help bring greater clarity to understanding a product’s requirements and increase the chances of building a product that works for more people in more situations without expensive redesign or retrofitting.
You might feel that a commitment to accessibility places extreme constraints on design and engineering creativity and innovation. The reality is that the opposite can be true. In the words of accessibility advocate Léonie Watson, accessibility is “a creative challenge, not a challenge to creativity.” Thinking about accessibility can help lead to innovative solutions. There are many examples where a product designed to meet specific user accessibility needs has led to innovation that benefits other audiences, for example:
- The cassette recorder was developed to provide a way for blind people to access written content by enabling tape recording, storing, and playing content in audio format. Spoken audio was soon augmented by music. Cassette recording then became a means to record, store, and play video content and digital data.
- The logic behind predictive text technology was created in an effort to help people with speech and communication difficulties communicate more effectively and efficiently. The emergence of mobile phones as text‑based communication devices, with their restricted keyboard input options, brought predictive text technology to a wider audience.
- Speech input technology developments were driven in part by the need to provide alternative ways for people with physical disabilities to interact with a computer. Today, speech input technology has evolved to the point that it’s a reliable and common way to interact with devices ranging from smartphones to home assistants.
In each of these examples, the primary initial focus of the innovation was on solving an accessibility challenge. The subsequent adoption of the technology may not have been predicted by its inventors, but the benefits the innovation has brought to the world should not be underestimated. Tim Brown, founder of the design agency IDEO, argued in his book, Change by Design, that designers should focus on populations at the margins, people typically neglected by designers when considering user needs. “By concentrating solely on the bulge at the center of the bell curve, we are more likely to confirm what we already know than learn something new and surprising.” In the context of accessibility, a focus on understanding and solving for user accessibility needs can lead to innovative technologies that are essential to everyday life.
We want to be careful here to avoid implying that developing accessible digital products is only worthwhile when there is an audience beyond the disability group that directly benefits. This is demeaning and disrespectful to disabled people. The argument that “accessibility is not just about people with disabilities” is often used to justify a return on investment in accessibility efforts, as if designing something that people with disabilities can use is insufficient motivation on its own. Describing the positive impact of accessible digital products on other audiences can certainly be persuasive, and in some cases, it may be necessary to convince some people, but it’s important not to appear to be trivializing or downplaying the benefits for people with disabilities when making an argument for greater focus on accessibility.
We see value in examining the benefits of an inclusive design approach because exploring accessibility in a broader context can provide additional fuel and momentum to accessibility and digital inclusion efforts. But our focus is on meeting the accessibility needs of people with disabilities.
From Horton, S., & Sloan, D. (2024). What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.
Know About Accessibility 