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Home Blog What “Accessible by Design” Really Means in Practice
“Accessible by Design” is showing up everywhere… in strategy decks, roadmaps, and executive level CX conversations.
Shani Jayant
June 26, 2026
That’s progress. But in many organizations, the phrase is being interpreted quite narrowly: as a property of the product, a standard the website meets, or a checklist before launch.
Here’s a reframe: accessible by design isn’t only about designing the product. It’s about designing the organization. How the company is built, who works there, who makes decisions, how everyday things operate- and your product is a layer on top of all of that. If the organization underneath isn’t designed for inclusion, no amount of design on the surface will hold.
I’ve seen the difference clearly across my career. When accessibility is considered early on, teams make better decisions, products perform better, and customers feel respected. When it’s left out as an afterthought, everyone pays for it later, in money and brand trust.
After twenty years as an accessibility practitioner, the clearest line I can draw between organizations that get this and organizations that don’t is one word: with.
Accessible by design means designing with people who use your products, not just for them. And the deepest version of “with” is employment. Disabled people working inside your company — not only as consultants and testers (though that matters too, and gives you a wide spectrum of user data), but as employees, embedded in product teams, holding roles with real decision-making power.
I’ve seen what this does firsthand. At the University of Washington, blind colleagues and graduate students shaped the research itself, not as subjects, as collaborators. At Intel, two colleagues with retinitis pigmentosa fundamentally changed the direction of our project, because they were on the project. In both cases, the work was better in ways no external review would have produced.
The uncomfortable truth: very few companies actually do this. Plenty bring in accessibility consultants. Far fewer hire disabled people into product, design, and engineering roles with real authority. That gap — between consulting disabled people and employing them — is where “accessible by design” either becomes real or stays a slogan.
When blind people are in the room where the roadmap is set, you don’t need a process to remind teams that screen reader navigation matters.
You’ve heard the business case. Customer expectations keep rising. Regulation is tightening — the European Accessibility Act is in effect, and the ADA has proved expensive to underestimate. The disabled market is enormous; in the UK alone it’s estimated at £446bn in annual spending power.
All true, and all useful levers for getting accessibility funded. But the real lever is meaning: whether your product and your support actually work in your customers’ lives, at the moments they need them. Legal exposure and market size are great ways to win the budget conversation. They don’t solve the problem at hand. Agency does. Dignity does. An organization that designs for those gets the business benefits as a side effect — not the other way around.
Many leaders say accessibility matters. The test is whether it shows up in who you hire, what you prioritize, and who gets to decide. Start here:
1. Who in your company is disabled — and what roles do they hold? Are they decision makers? Are they embedded in product teams? Or do disabled perspectives only enter through vendors and test panels?
2. Who is included — and excluded — by your product? Map it honestly. Every product makes this choice; most teams just make it implicitly.
3. Who on your team can advocate for inclusive design? Someone needs to carry the research, the users, and the diverse perspectives into everyday decisions — both from within the team and beyond it.
4. Are disabled users in your research from end to end? Early enough to shape direction, not just validate it at the finish line.
5. Is accessibility owned, measured, and reviewed like any other business priority? Shared responsibility is the goal — but without accountability, it will quickly evaporate.
Accessibility is not a standalone discipline. It’s part of a much larger, interconnected web of inclusion and intersectionality. Organizations that treat it that way build better products for everyone.
No organization gets all five right at once. Do the work. Be okay with making mistakes and asking questions — of your teams, of your organization, and of disabled people themselves. That posture is what leads to better experiences for your customers.
This is the work we think about every day at Be My Eyes — both in our own products and in how we help other companies serve blind and low-vision customers. If you’re working through these questions in your organization, we’d genuinely love to compare notes.
