You’re at a trendy new restaurant. The waiter hands you the menu – pale gray text on cream paper, delicate serif font, all very aesthetic. The only light? A flickering candle.
You squint. You tilt the menu toward the flame like you’re performing some kind of ritual. You guess at the prices. You order the wrong thing.
Congratulations: You’ve just experienced inaccessible design.
And here’s the thing – that menu wasn’t broken. It worked perfectly fine in the designer’s well-lit studio. It photographed beautifully for Instagram. It won awards.
It just didn’t work for people.
Design isn’t decoration. It’s communication.
Every choice you make – every color, every pixel of spacing, every hover state – is either opening a door or closing one.
And most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re holding the keys.
The myth of “accessibility vs. aesthetics”
There’s this persistent myth that accessible design is ugly design. That we have to choose between beautiful and usable.
That’s like saying ramps can’t be elegant. Or that glasses make people less attractive. Or that subtitles ruin movies.
It’s not just wrong – it’s boring.
The best designs in the world are the ones that work for everyone. They’re the ones that feel inevitable, effortless, obvious. Not because they’re simple, but because they’re clear.
Think about the iPhone. Love it or hate it, it revolutionized accessibility. VoiceOver built in from day one. Pinch to zoom. Text size controls. High contrast options.
These weren’t afterthoughts. They were design decisions. And they made the product better for everyone.
Design is already accessibility
Here’s something designers don’t always realize: You’re already doing accessibility work. You just might not call it that.
When you:
- Create visual hierarchy with headings
- Choose colors that stand out from each other
- Group related elements together
- Make buttons look clickable
- Keep navigation consistent
- Leave breathing room between elements
You’re not just making things “look nice.” You’re making them work.
The only question is: are you doing it on purpose?
The power part
Design has power. Real power.
The power to include or exclude. To clarify or confuse. To welcome or warn away.
You’ve felt it. That moment when a website just works. When you don’t have to think about where to click or what to do next. When everything feels exactly where it should be.
That’s not luck. That’s design doing its job.
But you’ve also felt the opposite. Forms that fight you. Buttons you can’t find. Text you can’t read. Navigation that makes no sense.
That’s design too. Design that forgot about people.
Every decision cascades
Let’s talk about that restaurant menu again.
The designer chose thin fonts. Elegant, minimal, sophisticated.
But that choice cascaded:
- Low contrast became even lower in dim light
- Older customers couldn’t read it without glasses
- The waiter had to explain every dish
- Orders took longer
- Tables turned over slower
- Tips decreased because of frustration
- Reviews mentioned the “pretentious” menu
One design decision. Dozens of consequences.
Now imagine that same cascade on your website. But instead of a confused diner, it’s someone trying to:
- Pay their rent
- Book a medical appointment
- Apply for a job
- Connect with family
- Access government services
The stakes are higher than we usually admit.
So what do we do?
We start by acknowledging that design and accessibility aren’t separate disciplines. They’re the same discipline with its full uniform on.
We stop treating accessibility like a feature request and start treating it like a design principle.
We test our designs with real people – including disabled people.
We learn the patterns that help and the patterns that hurt.
And we remember that we’re not just pushing pixels.
We’re building doorways.
Let’s make sure everyone can walk through them.
Coming up next:
- The building blocks that make design accessible by default
- How small decisions create big barriers (or remove them)
- Why your favorite design might be someone else’s wall
Because good design isn’t just beautiful. It’s possible.
And that changes everything.