Accessibility in Product Design – Making Great Products That Work for Everyone

Accessibility in product design isn’t an advantage – it’s a must. For starters, the EU Accessibility Act comes into force in June 2025, which will enforce higher standards for webmasters, bringing the overall expectations up. Moreover, accessibility is a major competitive advantage, opening your business to new customers. In this article, we look more deeply into this. We invite you to read on.

Why Accessibility Matters

First, we need to explain why accessibility matters. The word might prompt different feelings and associations depending on who you ask, but you’re most likely to hear answers such as:

creating products adjusted to people with disabilities.

The main issue here is simple: accessibility isn’t only for people with permanent disabilities. In product design, it involves creating products that everyone can use, regardless of their medical conditions, disabilities, and so forth. In practice, this means thinking about people with permanent disabilities and temporary ones.

Imagine you break an arm. If a web app requires you to navigate using both the keyboard and the mouse, you won’t be able to use it conveniently. If the website has small distances between interactive buttons, you might find it difficult to click with limited movement of your hand. Accessibility is also focused on tackling such problems – it’s not only for people with permanent disabilities, but for everyone!

Accessibility in Product Design

Accessibility in product design means a change of strategic approach – focusing on creating digital products that anyone can use. In practice, it is focused on:

• Creating an effective navigation for those with sight disabilities:
  • preparing alternative texts for visual elements,
  • ensuring that it is convenient to navigate using the keyboard instead of mouse,
  • adjusting colors for those who didn’t lose their sight, but for instance are colorblind,
  • selecting fonts that work for those with myopia,
  • etc.
• Building elements that are easy to navigate with limited movement:
  • ensuring that clickable elements are large enough to navigate through with ease, even if the user has limited movement,
  • building consistent and predictable layouts,
  • supporting assisting technologies.
• Providing clear navigational information:
  • using plain language to ensure everything is understandable even for those with cognitive disabilities,
  • avoiding the use of elements that could distract the user,
  • supporting memory limitations,
  • providing multiple content consumption options (visual, textual, audio),
  • ensuring that every user has enough time to consume the information provided (for instance, that the error message does not disappear after 1 or 2 seconds).

Whether you outsource IT projects, work in-house, or augment your team with external specialists, you have to consider all of the above in your product design – it’s a way to reach out to more users. However, we have some tips that can help you ensure that your digital products will be developed with accessible principles in mind!

How Do You Support Accessibility in Your Product Design Process?

There are a few ways you can empower your team and support accessibility in your product design process. Let’s look at some best practices that we recommend at j‑labs!

• Align your product development and product design teams. If you create smooth methods of communication between those teams, you’ll ensure that the information about accessibility guidelines will be exchanged and that your final product meets the principles you set at the beginning.
• Work with people with disabilities. This way, you will get first-hand feedback from your target users. It is the most valuable source of information, as they know best what works for them and what doesn’t.
• Source your knowledge. Outsource IT specialists and learn from the existing documentation. The WCAG guidelines, the EU Accessibility Act, and the information provided by associations of people with certain disabilities – all these sources will provide you with invaluable insights and help you build a good theoretical foundation before you start designing your product.

Accessibility Does Not Hinder UX – It Empowers It

While ensuring accessibility in product design might feel like a challenge, many of the good practices correspond with UX principles – for instance, maintaining consistency. Therefore, accessibility is just a small addition rather than a major challenge. It’s not a blocker, and it can actually drive innovation, so… don’t be afraid of it; instead, embrace it. The benefits are worth the trouble. And if you need help building accessible products, contact us at j‑labs – our IT specialists will be happy to help and share their knowledge with you!

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