Designing for people with disabilities
At the heart of inclusive design are people. Not technology, and not standards. Technology is what people use, and standards provide a foundation for access, but inclusive design is shaped by real use, not rule sets.
If you haven't already, dip into other posts in our Designing for disabilities series:
Regardless of your role, whether you are a content, visual, interaction, or user experience designer, your job is to create meaningful experiences for everyone, including people with different types of disabilities. This applies to all kinds of interface, from websites and apps to kiosks, extended reality (XR), smart TV interfaces, voice interfaces, and wearables.
Meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is part of that responsibility, but not all of it. After all, it’s people who use your product, not guidelines.
Here are a few considerations to underpin your design process and support more intentional, inclusive design.
Design for people not standards
Starting with people changes the kinds of decisions teams make. Inclusive design is not just about implementing requirements correctly, but about shaping outcomes that work for how people think, move, see, hear, and process information in real contexts.
WCAG provides the foundations, but compliance alone cannot define good design. Interfaces are used by different people, in different ways, and in different situations, and no set of guidelines can account for all of that complexity.
One way to broaden design thinking is to use the Inclusive Design Principles. These are not a set of requirements to comply with. Instead, they help teams clarify design intent and think through decisions that sit outside implementation guidance. WCAG focuses on how to implement things like colour contrast, text alternatives, and keyboard access. The Inclusive Design Principles focus on what to design in the first place, from choosing appropriate features to shaping user journeys and interactions around real people’s needs.
For example, WCAG can tell you how to make a complex multistep form accessible. Design intent asks whether that complexity is necessary at all, whether steps can be reduced, or whether the task should be supported differently.
Recognise that disability is not a set of edge cases
There are no absolutes in human experience. This is true across different types of disabilities, and even more so in how people interact with products and services.
What works well for one person may be confusing, tiring, or frustrating for another. Disabilities vary not only by type, but by severity, context, environment, and circumstance, all of which shape how someone experiences an interface at a given moment.
Take Steve, a London-based photographer who is both deaf and has low vision. His experience is different from someone who is only deaf or only has low vision. Having multiple disabilities shapes how he perceives and navigates the world, and how he interacts with digital products using particular combinations of assistive technology and adaptive strategies.
For Steve, design decisions that reduce reliance on hearing or fine visual detail can make a significant difference. Using the example of a multistep form again, clear visual feedback, predictable progression, and instructions support easy completion. By contrast, forms that depend on subtle visual cues, low-contrast overlays, or toasts can quickly become frustrating or inaccessible.
These design choices benefit everyone. They improve clarity and usability for everyone, not only people with disabilities.
Use design considerations that support multiple disabilities
The good news is that while disability is not a fixed or uniform experience, many needs overlap. As such, design considerations that work for someone with low vision, can also work for someone with reading disabilities or who is colour blind.
Here are just a few design considerations that support multiple types of disability:
- Clear and predictable journeys: user flows that make it obvious works for people who are blind as much as they do for people with cognitive disabilities or anxiety
- Meaningful feedback: confirming that an action has succeeded, failed, or is still in progress helps people with low vision, cognition, or reading disabilities who may miss subtle changes or audio cues
- Easy error prevention and correction: making it easy to avoid, correct, or recover from errors benefits people who may struggle with precision, focus, or confidence, including people who rely on a keyboard or don't use a mouse, as well as people who have cognitive or reading disabilities
Designing inclusively is also a form of future-proofing. Situational and temporary disabilities affect all of us at some point, whether it’s using a phone in bright sunlight, typing one-handed while holding a baby, using a mouse with an injured hand, or trying to complete a form when tired.
Include people with disabilities in the design process
There is no substitute for feedback from real people. WCAG assessments are essential for identifying technical accessibility issues, but they cannot show how an experience actually feels to use. Only people can tell you where something is confusing, exhausting, anxiety-inducing, or difficult to use.
Involving people with disabilities early and throughout the design process surfaces barriers that automated tools and compliance checks will never detect, such as unclear journeys, misleading feedback, or interactions that technically pass but are hard to use in practice.
Our inclusive user research series explores how to do this well with guidance on:
Build accessibility into the design process
Accessibility fails most often when it is treated as something to fix later. When it is built into the design process from the start, teams make better decisions earlier, avoid rework, and reduce the risk of shipping experiences that technically pass but are hard to use.
Embedding accessibility from planning through research, design, and delivery makes it part of how work gets done, not an extra step at the end. Accessible design systems play a key role here by locking in inclusive decisions, reducing duplication, and making accessible patterns the default rather than the exception.
Building accessibility into the design process saves time and cost over the long term, but just as importantly, it builds a culture of accessibility where inclusive design is expected, understood, and sustained.
Next steps
Find out more about usability testing at TetraLogical and how people with disabilities browsing the web using assistive technologies experience the web.