While they often overlap, accessibility and people-first design (sometimes called “inclusive design”) are not the same thing. Accessibility is focused on ensuring that digital tools and technology can be used by people with disabilities. People-first design describes methodologies to create products that account for and empower people of all backgrounds and abilities. It may address accessibility, age, economic situation, geographic location, language, race, and more. Put another way, accessibility is an outcome. People-first design is a process and a mindset. Both are important.
All Federal Government websites must be accessible to people with disabilities (see Section 3.6). By embracing people-first design, we can go beyond compliance to create digital products that serve as many people as possible in as many contexts as possible.
To adopt an inclusive mindset in your digital practice:
- Recognize exclusion. Exclusion means being left out. In a digital context, people are excluded when a product or design doesn’t meet their needs or preferences. Exclusion for users may be permanent (having one arm), temporary (wearing a cast makes it hard to type) or situational (holding a phone in one hand and a baby in the other).
- Learn from a range of perspectives. When digital experiences don’t serve people in the way they should, people adapt. Learning how people adapt to the world around them means spending time observing and understanding their experiences from their perspective. These unique perspectives are the key to people-first design.
- Solve for one, extend to many. Designing for people with disabilities can benefit a much larger group of people. For example, including video captions benefits a person experiencing hearing loss and someone in a noisy subway car. A solution that works well for someone who is blind might also benefit a person driving a car.45
It’s easy to imagine applying these principles to physical disabilities, but they work just as well for cognitive and intellectual disabilities. The way we design digital interactions can reduce cognitive demands that users experience. Reducing cognitive demands makes it easier for people to learn, focus, make decisions, recall, and communicate.
