We live in a world that demands a lot of attention. Whether someone is doomscrolling in a noisy café, managing fatigue via a health app, or navigating a website using a screen reader, one thing remains clear: digital experiences need to do more than simply function. They need to connect.
Digital and marketing teams work hard to deliver accessible websites. Often, and quite rightly, they rely on technical standards and tools, such as W3C guidelines and accessibility checkers, to guide their development plans.
Whilst these are essential foundations, I’d argue that they’re just the beginning.
A lack of curiosity
Too often, ‘compliant’ websites fail to deliver the user experience expected of them. Your automated WCAG analysis tools can scan for contrast ratios or missing alt text, but they can’t tell you how it feels to use your website. They won’t flag when your content is overwhelming, your navigation confusing, or your language unintentionally exclusive.
What’s often missing isn’t code, it’s curiosity.
Curiosity to ask:
- What’s it like to use this site with chronic fatigue?
- How easy is it for your users to remain focused long enough to complete a task?
- Does the content work for someone who is dyslexic?
These aren’t abstract questions; they come up time and again in our research with people living with long-term health conditions ranging from MS to depression, arthritis to cancer.
In a recent study, we observed how even small design oversights like small fonts, inaccessible date-pickers, or confusing signposting can impact a person’s daily challenges, leaving them frustrated, excluded, or simply left to give up on their task.
Focus on the right users
It’s easy to think of cognitive accessibility as something only a small percentage of users need. However, 1 in 7 people in the UK are neurodivergent – that’s more than 15% and designing for neurodivergence, like ADHD, autism or dyslexia, often results in a simpler, focused, and more human experience for everyone.
That’s not just a nice bonus; it’s the whole point.
The human cost
Many marketing and digital teams I meet are doing their best with limited time and tools. And while automated and technical fixes have their place, some human experience challenges can’t be ‘fixed’ in code alone. That’s where a more considered approach makes all the difference.
When we recently spent time with people with long-term health conditions navigating health-related websites, we saw the same pattern emerge:
- Effort – Potential users often expect a website to be overwhelming to use
- Focus – Users struggle to focus due to dense layouts and small fonts
- Fault – Sadly, users often blame themselves when the design doesn’t work for them
This last one really gets my goat and is fundamental as to why user experience as a discipline, profession, and/or a set of methodologies is essential to user interface design.
When digital spaces fail to accommodate user needs, they can quietly erode confidence, agency, and trust in their brand, as well as create friction and stress for its users.
The illusion of efficiency
As AI tools become more embedded in content and design workflows, there’s a growing temptation to let them shape user experiences. Used wisely and at the right point in the process, these tools can speed up production and flag technical issues. But they fail to bring emotional intelligence or lived experience to the table.
AI doesn’t know what it feels like to live with fatigue, brain fog, or anxiety. It can’t anticipate how someone might misinterpret a call to action, or how a design pattern might confuse someone with memory challenges.
That’s why now, more than ever, we need more people in the loop. Real, diverse, thoughtful people, asking better questions, noticing subtleties, and listening to users who don’t always get heard.
Design with, not for, your people
Sometimes, the most transformational insight comes from a quiet comment in a research session:
“I just didn’t know where to look.”
“I’m so stupid”
“I’m not very good at filling in forms”
These moments of friction, emotional as much as functional, can’t be automated away. But they can be designed with. Not for users, but alongside them.
Make change for big impact
Embedding inclusive design doesn’t have to mean reinventing your process. Often it starts with smaller, more intentional actions:
- Invite a wider range of voices into your user research
- Prioritise clarity over cleverness in content
- Ensure keyboard navigation works across all interactions
In one recent project, we helped surface stories in more relatable ways, allowing users to filter exercises by health condition. That small shift made the content feel personal, useful, and discoverable. And it was something the digital team could action easily and relatively quickly.
These are the kinds of insights that don’t come from heatmaps, analytics dashboards or automated reports. They come from sitting down with real people, asking open questions, and observing how things land in practice, not just in theory.
But why?
It’s tempting to treat accessibility (and wider usability) as something that can be solved with checklists, tools, or tech alone. But data will only ever tell you what people did, not why they did it, let alone what led them to leave the website and choose a competitor.
If you want to design a digital experience that truly includes and supports your users, regular usability testing and user research, especially with people who live with disability or long-term conditions, should be an essential entry in your digital roadmap.
Because real inclusion doesn’t happen at the edge of a spreadsheet. It happens when we take the time to listen, learn, and design with care.
That’s where the real magic happens.
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