Start learning about accessibility: part 2

This is the second in a short series of blog posts introducing the topic of accessibility. If you missed it, I recommend reading part 1.

In this blog we look at why you should prioritise accessibility — including the following arguments:

Why you should prioritise accessibility

Different people, teams and organisations will have different arguments that resonate more with them. We will look at a few key reasons to take accessibility seriously. My hope is you can mix and match from the below, depending on who you're talking with, to best champion accessibility where you work.

Ethical

It is unethical to design and build products and services that discriminate against people. This includes people with disabilities.

Unless you are taking active steps to make sure your product or service does not introduce barriers to disabled people, you are almost certainly discriminating. It's not acceptable to claim ignorance — especially when there are so many tools, resources and guidelines to help you avoid doing so.

We all remember a time when we were excluded from participating in a situation. It might have been a time we were left out from an activity at a school, work or social event. It feels awful. Now imagine that this is something you experience regularly. It is our duty, as a healthy society, to do everything we can to stop this cycle.

It's quite simple. Do you give a crap about your fellow: humans, users, customers? Unless the honest answer is 'no' then you must do the work to create things that are accessible.

Legal

In recognition of the ethical importance of accessibility, there are several legal implications for poor accessibility, too. Below we will look at a few key legal aspects to accessibility. I have focussed on the UK and Europe — as this is where I have the most understanding / experience.

Equality Act 2010

In the UK, the Equality Act was introduced in 2010. The purpose of the Act was to protect people from discrimination in work and society in general. The Act states that organisations must make 'reasonable adjustments' for people with disabilities to make sure they are not discriminated against. The Act doesn't detail which standards to follow or steps to take to avoid introducing accessibility barriers, however. This has resulted in organisations failing to meet basic standards of accessibility for many years.

Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018

In 2018, the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) were introduced. It seems this was, at least partly, a response to the fact that, up to this point, organisations were not meeting the obligations set out by the Equality Act — in particular with regards providing accessible digital interactions.

Unlike the Equality Act, PSBAR pointed to a specific standard which public sector organisations must reach. This standard was the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The 2 key requirements of PSBAR are that public sector organisations must:

European Accessibility Act 2025

Following a similar approach to PSBAR, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) was introduced in 2025. The EAA looks to enforce similar standards outlined in PSBAR (and the equivalent regulations across Europe) but for private sector organisations selling to the European Market. The ambition being to force the private sector to significantly raise the bar of accessibility. The private sector has lagged behind for too long.

If you'd like to learn more about accessibility policy in your location, the W3C provides a comprehensive table of international accessibility policies.

Better more innovative products

A less discussed reason to prioritise accessibility is that it simply leads to better products and, often, more innovative solutions.

There are many, many examples of products and technologies we all enjoy and don't think twice about that started out as solutions intended, specifically, at removing an accessibility barrier. A few key examples include:

Below we'll look closer at why it might be that accessibility consideration often leads to innovation.

Firstly, fixing accessibility barriers for a smaller, specific group generally results in raising the experiential bar for a much wider group of users. Those lowered pavements previously mentioned help people in wheelchairs but they also help: parents pushing prams, cyclists and delivery workers with trolleys, to name a few.

In the technology world, once organisations notice the potential benefits of (accessibility) ideas, they can be formalised as 'features', gain greater investment, iterated and improved and find themselves opened up to a much wider group.

Secondly, once we start to adopt a multi-sensory worldview — for example, considering the non-visual experience — we naturally find our minds coaxing us into identifying new and exciting solutions.

An example of an organisation that has used accessibility (and inclusion) to drive innovation, is the Xbox team at Microsoft. It doesn't just design for people with disabilities. It designs with people with disabilities. It also pushes further than this. Their aim is to reduce all types of exclusion to gaming — considering things like: race, gender, sexual orientation — identity in various forms and, indeed, other protected characteristics.

Future proofing

Another key reason to prioritise accessibility is it can help your content to work more effectively in different contexts across different platforms. For example, if you have well formed and semantic HTML this benefits assistive technologies but it also helps new platforms to understand and present your information. In some cases you might not even fully understand how these platforms work but the likelihood is that accessible code will already be better prepared for use in these contexts.

Conversational and Ai-driven interfaces

By structuring code using the most descriptive and appropriate HTML elements — such as:

Ai is more easily able to understand and present content.

Novel devices like the Apple Watch are also better able to format /present information. And, the accessibility features included with the operating systems on these devices will often work more consistently with your content. For example, well formed content is more likely to respond to user settings relating to colour, contrast or text sizing.

Cost and efficiency

Accessibility issues are bugs. Any development team knows that it is costly to fix bugs later in the process. So, prioritising catching accessibility issues early will save you time in fixing code and therefore saves you money. It's as simple as that.

Further reading

In the next blog — part 3 — we will start to look at some of the skills and tools you can use to design and build accessible experiences.