We already explored why accessibility matters and what it entails for product development in our previous article. Now, with the European Accessibility Act coming into effect in June 2025, many companies are looking to put these concepts into practice. But where do you start? How can you incorporate accessibility into your product development process?
Below, we provide five practical recommendations for product people who want to begin thinking about accessibility in their products. From understanding your user base to conducting usability tests, these steps will help you create more inclusive digital experiences and prepare for upcoming regulations.
1. Digest relevant data
There are about 15% of people living with disabilities around the world. If you offer general products and services, there will likely be a similar percentage among your users.
For example, there is a WebAIM survey that's periodically conducted among screen reader users. They report various characteristics such as type of disability, age, preferred device and platform, or specific features they use. Digesting surveys such as these can help you understand the various needs of different users. For instance, you can see that the majority of screen reader users suffer from blindness, but there are also users with cognitive, auditory, or motor disabilities.
Understanding which disabilities may be present among your users can help you prioritise the order in which you should focus on them.
2. Look for obvious issues
There is a great public database called Access Guide that offers more than 100 accessibility recommendations with practical examples. You can check which apply to your product. Many accessibility issues may also originate from brand guidelines and UI kits. By comparing them to the Access Guide database, you can spot obvious issues and start addressing them. The database is easy to navigate thanks to the use of tags.
All three pillars mentioned in the previous article have their own tags, so you can also delegate the inspection to your designers, developers, and copywriters by simply filtering what's relevant for each team.
3. Prioritise user groups
It can be overwhelming to make sense of the various use cases, recommendations, and types of disabilities that should be addressed by accessibility. You may not have the resources to address all disabilities at the same time, so you will likely have to create a roadmap for covering all accessibility requirements. Conducting a workshop with your stakeholders can help you segment the user base effectively and prioritise specific groups. It may also be necessary due to time or budget constraints.
An inclusive panda canvas can be useful in such a workshop. It helps you distinguish between three groups of users. The majority of users are called “the Included”. These are the users you intentionally create your product for, and you probably know a lot about their needs already.
Then you have “the Excluded”—the people who are able to use the product, but you haven't put any intentional effort into accommodating them. For example, you might have your code compatible with screen readers without realising it, but then you can unintentionally break it with a new feature.
The third group of users is “the Unwanted”. These are people who you purposely don't want to use your product. This can be due to age-restricted content or wild animations that are not suitable for people with epilepsy.
After the workshop, you should have a better understanding of who should be included, excluded, and unwanted in your services.
4. Empathise with your users
When you have segmented your user base and decided who you want to include, it's a good time to start empathising with the users. Accessibility personas are a good way to do this. For example, consider Lee. He likes to shop online, but often encounters barriers on websites which don't accurately describe product images, or use colours alone in the UI to communicate error messages.
For this reason, Lee only chooses shops that make it possible to complete the order without overcoming these barriers. By making your website accessible, you allow Lee to use your service, which means you have one more customer who's willing to spend his money with you.
It's usually a good idea to create personas for each user group you want to accommodate, because they may have very different needs.
5. Conduct usability testing
When you have your personas described, it's time to conduct usability testing with real users. The most important thing is to recruit users that match your accessibility personas as closely as possible. That's because healthy people can't provide nearly as valid feedback as disabled users. It's not enough if a healthy person just closes their eyes and pretends to be blind.
People with disabilities can have very different mental models of the outside world compared to those without disabilities. Some of the severely visually impaired people may never have seen what a website looks like and they rely entirely on screen reading technologies.
The good news is that you don't need too many people for usability testing. A case study from the Nielsen Norman Group found that 5 people are enough to detect 85% of usability issues. This means 5 users per group. So if you run just 5 tests, you can spot the issues, correct them, and test again with another 5 people. This way, the whole testing process will be much more efficient than having dozens of users reporting the same issues.
The bottom line
Achieving accessibility may not be fast or particularly entertaining. It's often about small details and nuances that need to be taken one by one. However, there is a significant amount of people who will really appreciate the effort you put into a refined accessible digital product. If it's done right, you will reach more people and also allow your current users to use the product in a wider range of contexts. That's worth it, isn't it?
