Want to catch more eyes (and hearts) with your product?

Cathrine Mejdal
Nov 14
1 min read

Make it irresistible with these 5 keys to accessible design.

Here is what you should keep in mind when you design or develop a product:

Think physical, sensory, cognitive, neurodivergent, and mental accessibility as a quality, your product must have. Along the lines of security, performativity and saleability.

Why?

As Sarah Horton and David Sloan explain in "What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility" (a must-read, by the way), accessibility is not just a legal obligation or an add-on. It is a core quality attribute.

It directly impacts how usable a product is and for whom.

And like any other quality, it needs to be defined in context if you want to include the otherwise excluded end users:

Who is affected?
In what way?
Under which circumstances?

The benefits of treating accessibility as a design quality, is that we also treat it as a process - one that requires continuous attention, iteration and redesign.

Aimi H., in the wonderfully written "Building Access" (another must-read), reminds us that design is never neutral.

Every product, interface, or system tells us something about who it’s built for - and who it leaves out.

It goes without telling that accessibility is not a Band-Aid solution.

It needs to be integrated. Ergo:

Inclusive design means designing with, not just for, disabled people. It is participatory, intersectional, and expansive.
Inclusive design does not limit your market - it grows it.
By building access in early, you make your product usable and relevant to entire segments of users who are too often excluded.
So get started with these tools and gain ground by thinking accessibility into your business and product strategy.