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

Key Points

• Accessibility is a Necessity, Not a Luxury: With the EU Accessibility Act coming into force in June 2025, businesses must adapt to meet new legal standards. Accessibility in product design is essential for creating inclusive digital products for everyone, not just those with permanent disabilities.
• Wider Reach: Accessibility opens businesses to a broader audience, including people with temporary disabilities or challenges, such as a broken arm, which can affect usability. It also improves user experience for people with visual impairments, cognitive disabilities, and mobility issues.
• Designing for Accessibility:
  • For Sight Disabilities: Provide alternative text for images, keyboard navigation, and ensure color contrast is suitable for colorblind users.
  • For Limited Movement: Make clickable elements large enough and ensure predictable, consistent layouts.
  • For Cognitive Disabilities: Use plain language, avoid distracting elements, and offer multiple content formats (visual, textual, and audio).
• Best Practices to Support Accessibility:
  • Align development and design teams to exchange accessibility guidelines.
  • Involve people with disabilities to get real feedback on usability.
  • Source knowledge from WCAG guidelines, the EU Accessibility Act, and relevant organizations to ensure compliance and effective design.
• Accessibility Enhances UX: Implementing accessibility doesn’t hinder user experience; instead, it complements and enhances UX design. Practices like consistency and simplicity in design work hand in hand with accessibility principles, leading to a more effective product.
• Benefits of Accessibility:
  • Legal Compliance: Meeting accessibility standards avoids legal risks.
  • Expanded Market Reach: Accessible products can be used by a larger pool of users, including those with disabilities.
  • Innovation Driver: Accessibility can spark new ideas and improvements in design.

Accessibility in product design isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a necessity. 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!

You might also read: What IT training should employers invest in?

FAQ

Why is accessibility important in product design?

Accessibility ensures that digital products can be used by everyone, including people with disabilities, but also by those with temporary conditions. It broadens the user base, improves the user experience, and ensures compliance with upcoming regulations like the EU Accessibility Act.

How can accessibility in design benefit my business?

Implementing accessibility increases your reach by catering to a broader range of users, including those with impairments. It also improves customer satisfaction and loyalty, while ensuring compliance with legal standards, reducing the risk of legal penalties.

How do I ensure my team incorporates accessibility principles into product design?

To support accessibility:

• Align product design and development teams to ensure smooth communication.
• Work with people with disabilities to gather first-hand feedback.
• Consult guidelines like WCAG and legal requirements to build a strong foundation for accessible design.

Can focusing on accessibility improve UX?

Yes! Accessibility and UX design principles align well. Focusing on accessibility often leads to better, more user-friendly designs. It doesn’t add complexity but rather enriches the overall experience for all users, promoting innovation.

What are the legal requirements for accessibility in digital products?

The EU Accessibility Act (effective from June 2025) mandates accessibility for public sector websites and apps. Compliance with the act ensures that your products meet the legal standards and can be used by individuals with disabilities, avoiding potential legal risks.