Best Practices in Inclusive Design

Inclusive design isn’t treating accessibility as a checklist at the end of development, but recognising that designing for diverse abilities and contexts makes products better for everyone.

The kerb cut effect is the classic example: ramps designed for wheelchair users also help people with strollers, luggage, and delivery carts. Inclusive design consistently creates these broader benefits.

The Evolution of Inclusive Design

Inclusive design has evolved significantly from its origins in accessibility compliance. Early efforts focused on meeting legal requirements — making sure products didn’t violate disability discrimination laws. The work was important but often felt like box-ticking.

Current best practice recognises inclusion as a design philosophy, not a compliance burden. It starts from the premise that users are diverse — in ability, context, device, connectivity, language, and more — and designs systems that accommodate that diversity from the ground up.

This shift changes when and how inclusion work happens. Instead of retrofitting accessibility at the end, teams integrate inclusive thinking throughout design and development. The result is better products and lower long-term maintenance costs.

The Development Context

Technical Considerations

Inclusive design has significant technical implications that teams often underestimate. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re architectural decisions that become expensive to change later.

Semantic HTML matters: Screen readers and other assistive technologies rely on proper document structure. Using divs for everything might look the same visually but creates barriers for users who can’t see the screen. Engineers need to understand semantic markup as a foundation, not a finishing touch.

Keyboard navigation is essential: Not everyone uses a mouse. Power users prefer keyboards. Users with motor impairments may rely on them. Products need to be fully operable via keyboard, which means careful attention to focus states, tab order, and keyboard shortcuts.

Colour isn’t reliable: Colour blindness affects roughly 8% of men. But even users with typical colour vision encounter situations — bright sunlight, poor displays, printed materials — where colour distinctions fail. Information conveyed through colour needs redundant encoding.

Performance is accessibility: Slow products exclude users with older devices, limited connectivity, or expensive data plans. The “average” connection is faster than what many real users experience. Design for the constraints your actual users face, not your development environment.

Content structure affects comprehension: Clear headings, short paragraphs, and logical organisation help users with cognitive disabilities — and everyone else too. Dense walls of text exclude more people than most visual design decisions.

Team Dynamics

Inclusive design requires cross-functional collaboration. Designers need to specify accessible interactions. Engineers need to implement them correctly. QA needs to test with assistive technologies. Content creators need to write clearly.

This collaboration often reveals gaps in team capabilities. Few teams have extensive experience with screen readers. Fewer still test with actual users who have disabilities. Building these skills takes intentional investment.

Avoid the “accessibility person” anti-pattern. When one team member owns inclusion, everyone else stops thinking about it. The result is better compliance but not better design. Inclusive thinking needs to be distributed across the team.

Bring real users with disabilities into your research practice. Second-hand understanding is valuable but insufficient. Watching someone navigate your product with a screen reader reveals problems that automated testing and able-bodied testers miss.

“Every design decision has inclusion implications. The question isn’t whether to consider them, it’s whether to consider them now, when changes are cheap, or later, when they’re expensive.”

Implementation Approach

Best Practices

Start with permanent disabilities, benefit everyone: Design first for users who will always need accommodations. Permanent vision loss, motor impairments, hearing loss. These designs then help users with temporary limitations (broken arm, ear infection) and situational constraints (bright sunlight, noisy environment, hands full).

Design for one-handed, single-focus use: Assume users might be operating your product with one hand while distracted. This isn’t about edge cases, it’s about how most people actually use mobile products. Targets need to be large enough. Actions need to be reversible. Information needs to be scannable.

Provide multiple ways to accomplish tasks: Users have different capabilities and preferences. Offer redundant paths - search and browse, click and keyboard, visual and audio. The flexibility helps everyone while being essential for some.

Make system state obvious: Users need to know what’s happening, what happened, and what they can do next. This is especially important for screen reader users who can’t see visual feedback, but helps everyone understand system behaviour.

Write clearly and simply: Complex language excludes users with cognitive disabilities, non-native speakers, and anyone who’s tired or distracted—, hich is most of us, most of the time. Favour short sentences, common words, and active voice.

Test with real assistive technologies: Automated accessibility testing catches some issues but misses many others. Regular testing with screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, and other assistive technologies reveals problems that tools miss.

Tooling and Process

Integrate accessibility linting into your development workflow. Tools like axe, WAVE, or built-in browser dev tools catch common issues automatically.

Include accessibility criteria in your definition of done. Features aren’t complete until they’re keyboard navigable, screen-reader compatible, and colour-independent.

Create component libraries with accessibility baked in. When engineers use your button component, it should come with proper focus states, ARIA labels, and keyboard behaviour. Don’t make every developer rediscover accessibility requirements.

Establish testing protocols that include assistive technologies. At minimum, test with keyboard-only navigation and at least one screen reader (VoiceOver on Mac/iOS, NVDA or JAWS on Windows, TalkBack on Android).

Document accessibility patterns alongside other design system documentation. Teams need references for how to implement accessible modals, form validation, navigation, and other common patterns.

Scaling What Works

Growth Considerations

As products grow, inclusion debt accumulates. New features get built without consistent accessibility consideration. Different teams develop different standards. Technical decisions in one area create barriers in another.

Combat this through systematic investment:

Establish accessibility standards: Document what “accessible” means for your product specifically. Reference WCAG guidelines but contextualise them for your product and users.

Train continuously: New team members need onboarding in inclusive design practices. Existing team members need refreshers as standards and technologies evolve.

Build expertise: Someone on the team should develop deep accessibility expertise—not to own all the work, but to advise, review, and escalate appropriately.

Include inclusion in architectural decisions: Major technical choices have accessibility implications. Include these in architectural review processes.

Maintaining Quality

Regular audits help maintain quality over time. Audit key user journeys at least quarterly. Audit new features before launch.

Track accessibility bugs with appropriate severity. A button that can’t be clicked via keyboard isn’t a minor issue, it’s a blocking bug for some users.

Include users with disabilities in ongoing research. Their feedback reveals problems that internal testing misses and keeps inclusion grounded in real experience rather than abstract guidelines.

Celebrate inclusion wins. When teams ship accessible features or fix long-standing barriers, recognise the work. Culture shapes behaviour, and recognising inclusion work builds culture that values it.

Key Takeaways

Inclusive design benefits everyone - features designed for accessibility often improve the experience for all users
Technical foundations (semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, colour independence) are architectural decisions that get expensive to retrofit
Distribute inclusive thinking across the team rather than concentrating it in one “accessibility person”
Test with real assistive technologies and real users with disabilities, not just automated tools
Build accessibility into components and definitions of done so it’s the default, not an afterthought

Next Steps This Week

Pick one key user flow in your product and navigate it using only a keyboard—no mouse or trackpad. Note where you get stuck, lose focus, or can’t tell where you are.

Those friction points aren’t just accessibility issues, they’re usability issues affecting many users. Fixing them makes your product better for everyone.

That’s the core truth of inclusive design: when you design for the extremes, you improve the middle.

Have questions or thoughts? Get in touch - I’d love to hear from you!