Design For All feat. Matt Roberts

Here’s our chat with Matt Roberts, Senior UX Designer at Sightsavers and Co-Chair of the BIMA Inclusive Design Council. Matt shares how his personal experience of colour blindness sparked a passion for inclusive design and accessibility—both in digital products and beyond.

From championing inclusive practices in charity and government work, to speaking publicly and driving industry-wide change, here Matt offers practical advice and insights for anyone looking to design with empathy, purpose, and impact.

Can you please introduce yourself, what you do and tell us about your experience?

Hi, my name is Matt Roberts and I’m a Senior UX Designer at Sightsavers, a charity that protects sight and fights for disability rights across Africa and Asia. A lot of my work focuses on digital accessibility and inclusive design where I ensure experiences on websites work for as many people as possible.

As an extension of my interest and specialism in digital accessibility and inclusive design, I sit as the co-chair of the BIMA inclusive design council – ‘we inspire and support the wider digital industry to create experiences that allow everyone to participate equally in the digital world.’ Over the years we’ve run online masterclasses, held roundtables, and in 2021 established the Inclusive Design award into the BIMA award program to ensure this area of design is put at the forefront of the industry.

My interest and starting point in inclusive design is a personal one. I am colourblind, and ever since sharing this more publicly with the Creative Review article ‘Being a colourblind designer’ I realised the importance and value to others about sharing insights. Since then, I’ve pursued public speaking engagements and article contributions to share personal experiences of colour blindness, arthritis, and hard of hearing with the aim of challenging assumptions, progressing the conversation on inclusion, and influencing businesses to put inclusive design as a key priority in their service or product development. 

How important is inclusion to your work?

It’s vital. Whether I’m looking at inclusion through a research, designing, testing, or developing lens, inclusion is a consistent component. 

Approaching projects and conversations with an inclusive design mindset from the start allows us to really understand how to deliver the best inclusive experiences. 

As a public speaker talking about inclusion, it’s important that I do as I say. Embedding accessible and inclusive design considerations into the presentation itself. Considerations on how I present myself and the talk itself ensures that the broadest possible audience can follow the content. As an example, simply having the slides available for everyone from the start of the presentation really helps people follow at a pace that suits them on a device, format that they find most useful. “If you’d like to follow along using your own device, the slides are available at www…” 

How are you promoting inclusive design through your work and what are some of the challenges you’ve faced?

There are lots of ways to promote inclusive design through work, some more obvious than others.

Alongside the process of ensuring with any design project I talk, test, and innovate with a variety of people, a lot can be said about keeping things simple and making time to understand people outside of ‘work’. Popping the kettle on to have a truly honest and authentic conversation goes a long way to understanding people’s motivations, frustrations, and day-to-day experiences.  

Bringing the experiences and voices of other people outside the project team into the meeting is a really effective way to promote inclusion. “When speaking to Akhil about his experience of, he said…”

There is definitely a momentum this year that inclusive design and accessibility is a more straightforward component to ‘sell-in’ to projects and processes. However, there are definitely a few common themes that still arise… 

One challenge is for clients and stakeholders acknowledging that ‘it’, inclusion, (whatever that context may be) is never complete. There’s always something to learn. Shifting a mindset of ‘complete’ to ‘improvement’ may not be straightforward, but is a much more useful and accurate headspace to be in.

What are 2-3 tips you’d share to other designers trying to design more inclusively

This question is a simple one to answer.

1. Start next project. Start Monday. Just start! A lot of us can put things off because of ‘this’ or ‘that’, but it’s so important to just start. The smallest thing can have the biggest impact. For example, adding alt text to an image on a social media post, can allow a screen reader user to see your image. Invaluable impact for such a low effort.
2. Be curious. There are so many avenues to explore in inclusive design and accessibility. Be curious enough to ask, discover, and learn something new. 
3. Be willing to get things wrong in order to learn and progress. People can get really nervous on the topic of diversity, inclusion and disability. Be confident enough to do something, rather than nothing at all. Then, most importantly, be willing to improve it with the more you learn from feedback, insights, and expert advice. 

What are some of the resources you’ve found helpful to develop your understanding of accessibility and inclusion when it comes to your design work?

Great question! There’s loads I could share, but here’s a few things that have helped me, and/or things I encourage people to do. 

• Something to join – Champions of Accessibility Network 

• Something to read – MisMatch by Kat Holmes 

• Someone to follow – Molly Barnes 

• Something to watch – ‘Assume that I can’ 

• Something to do – HSBC inclusion learning hub 

Accessible Design Resources
Following the insightful recommendations from our Design For All participants, we’ve curated an extensive collection of tools, guides, articles, books, blogs, and videos. This resource is specifically designed to support accessibility and inclusion specialists at every stage of their journey.

View Accessible Design Resources