Lessons from the Community: Design For All

This article delves into the significance of accessible design, highlighting insights from accessibility specialists and the impact of the upcoming European Accessibility Act.

Accessible design is key in ensuring that websites, services, products and places are inclusive of everyone. But understanding of, and investment into, accessibility and inclusion is not where it needs to be. A 2024 AbilityNet survey found that 19% of respondents considered digital accessibility was a low priority in their organisations, with none of the respondents answering that it was a very high priority. A study by WebAIM found notable increases in accessibility issues across the top 1 million home pages in 2024 – a major problem given around 135 million users across Europe are living with a permanent disability. 

Inconsistent senior buy-in, limited budgets, and an uncertain market have been barriers to significant advances in digital accessibility. Considerable improvements are needed across the board to ensure that services, products, places and the web are designed to work for everyone.  
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The European Accessibility Act, which businesses operating in Europe will need to comply with by June, should lead to some improvements in this area in 2025. Additionally, while businesses are sometimes failing to prioritise accessibility, more professionals appear to understand accessibility basics, and despite a slow job market, accessible design skills appear to be in increasing demand. More change is needed, but there are positive signs of improvement going forward. 

In 2024, we spoke to individuals working to make the design landscape more inclusive. Through our Design for All interview series, we have heard from accessibility specialists working on products, websites, apps, wayfinding strategies, and written content. These specialists have shared lived experiences of disability and neurodiversity, insights on designing inclusively, and useful resources for anyone looking to improve the accessibility of their designs.

We’d like to express our thanks to all of our contributors this year; Oliver Quinlan, Tom Pinks, Emily Yates, Henny Swan, Cameron Farwell, Rodrigo Sanchez, and Katy Cooper. Here are some of the valuable insights from our contributors.

Contributor insight

Emily Yates on designing with people with lived experience. 

“Listen, learn, ensure involvement is well-considered and useful (rather than tokenistic) and pay people for their time and expertise. It’s the simplest four-step process that will completely transform how you design but, more importantly, the perspective from which you see the world around you.”

Henny Swan on designing for edge cases. 

“While guidelines are great, even accessibility guidelines are based on what works for the majority within the disabled community, and they might not account for the full diversity of needs. Designing for the edge cases can lead to solutions that not only benefit the people who need them the most but also improve the experience for everyone. 

Take voice interfaces, for example. They were originally designed for people who couldn’t see, but now they’re part of everyday life. The same goes for keyboards and closed captions—designed for specific needs but now used by many people in various contexts. So again, it’s about designing for those edge cases because that’s where you find some fantastic design solutions that positively affect everybody.”

Craig Abbott on the accessibility triangle.

“As a general strategy for accessibility, I’ve always taken a 3-pronged approach with a focus on compliance, culture, and education. 

I think of it a bit like the fire triangle they teach you in Science class, where you have oxygen, heat and fuel as the 3 sides, and when you remove one the fire goes out. 

In the accessibility triangle, if education is removed, people don’t know how to do accessibility. If culture is removed, people don’t think accessibility is important. And, if compliance is removed, there’s no way to measure whether or not accessibility is being done to the correct standard. Culture is always going to be the hardest to change. Compliance and education are much easier, and in the process you can start to change the culture.”

Cameron Farwell on doing what you can with limited investment. 

“Something is better than nothing. If an organisation isn’t as willing to invest in accessibility as much as it ideally should, it’s worth noting that bringing in some elements of accessibility is better than none. Lots of beneficial things can be achieved with fairly low effort and, over time, these small gains will begin to add up. It also makes the potential task of further improvements less daunting when there you aren’t starting from zero.”

The specialists we spoke with have also been kind enough to share recommendations to help make your designs more accessible. We have collected these into a comprehensive Accessible Design Resources List of tools, guides, articles, books, blogs, and videos tailored for specialists at every level – here are our top 3: 

• WAVE is a suite of tools helping authors easily scan web content for accessibility issues.  

• The Inclusive Design Principles are 7 principles that designers and developers can use to guide their work.  

• Inclusive Design 24 Conference is over 20 hours of talks by accessibility experts, available in full on YouTube.  

We will be continuing the series over this year and can’t wait to share more insights from experts over 2025. If you’re interested in taking part, please contact me at chris.n@adlib-recruitment.co.uk.