Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
Gold
Wednesday, June 8, 2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Share the love for this talk
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
Speakers: Sam Proulx
Link:

Summary

Many organizations struggle with justifying and prioritizing accessibility. One of the primary reasons is because they’re thinking about accessibility all wrong. Instead of a checklist, a list of legal requirements, or a set of shackles holding designers and developers back, it’s time to start thinking of accessibility as what it is: an opportunity to innovate! In this presentation, Fable will draw from our expertise helping organizations like yours start the accessibility journey, to change the way you think about disability, assistive technology, and accessibility. We will demonstrate that accessible products are more flexible, customizable, and useful for all users. We’ll also show you how accessibility is directly tied to the creation of many of the most exciting and innovative technologies of the last 50 years, and how it’s changed the entire world for everyone. This presentation will inspire you with the information and ideas you need to accelerate your accessibility journey.

Key Insights

  • Many accessibility features like dark mode and voice assistants began as disability aids and are now mainstream because they improve experiences for all users.

  • One in five people live with long-term disability, and everyone can experience situational or temporary disabilities throughout life.

  • Accessible design is about creating flexible, customizable products rather than oversimplified or lowest-common-denominator solutions.

  • Diverse teams lead to innovative, inclusive products by uncovering use cases and solutions that homogeneous teams might miss.

  • Accessibility is a journey, not a one-time checklist fix, and must be integrated continuously into research, design, and development.

  • Disability is a universal and changing identity, highlighting that accessible products design for our future selves.

  • Humanizing accessibility by involving people with disabilities in training and product testing builds empathy and better buy-in.

  • Major companies like Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft embed accessibility as part of their core product experiences, showing its feasibility.

  • Innovations originally designed for accessibility, such as GPS and electric toothbrushes, often become more widely adopted because they offer superior usability.

  • Data sonification and advanced APIs allow vision-challenged users to access complex visual data like graphs in new ways, signaling ongoing innovation.

Notable Quotes

"Dark mode started off as an accessibility feature for visual challenges and eventually became mainstream because it’s so valuable for everyone."

"Everyone uses voice assistance now, whether controlling a smart home or sending a quick text; it gives independence to people with disabilities and convenience to all."

"Disability is the only identity that all of us will probably adopt at some point during our lives."

"If we are designing experiences that don’t work for everyone today, we’re designing experiences that in a couple of years will exclude ourselves."

"Accessible design is not about shackles or lowest-common-denominator; it’s about building great, flexible experiences for everyone."

"The Last of Us 2 was the first console game a completely blind person could play from start to finish by adding innovative, customizable accessibility features."

"Separate accessible designs are never equal, so we must design inclusively from the start to unlock all the benefits of accessibility."

"It is cheaper and better to do accessibility right the first time than to retrofit and fix later."

"Bringing people with disabilities into ideation and prototyping helps build accessibility by design and eliminates costly retrofits."

"Disability is normal, not shameful or rare, and everyone can benefit from accessibility innovations."

Ask the Rosenbot
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Raven Veal
Dark Metrics: Illuminating the Negative Impact of Digital Health Design
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Brenna Fallon
Learning Over Outcomes
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Joseph Meersman
Sweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Kate Towsey
Shaping the future of research ops: Expanding roles and strategies for a more integrated research ecosystem
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Jim Kalbach
Jobs To Be Done
2021 • Enterprise Community
Saskia Liebenberg
Start Small for Big Impact
2019 • DesignOps Community
Ryan Matthew
Bridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Cassini Nazir
The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Sam Ladner
Data Exhaust and Personal Data: Learning from Consumer Products to Enhance Enterprise UX
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Scale is Social Work
2020 • DesignOps Community
Lija Hogan
Practical Principles of Inclusive Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
John Paul de Guzman
10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Nancy Douyon
We'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Dan Willis
Theme 3: Intro
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Carol Smith
Operationalizing Responsible, Human-Centered AI
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold

More Videos

Sam Proulx

"I’ve nearly bought products in my sleep because I memorized the key presses from consistent checkout flows."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

June 7, 2023

Ignacio Martinez

"Career managers develop close relationships with designers and advocate for staffing and promotions on their behalf."

Ignacio Martinez

Fair and Effective Designer Evaluation

September 25, 2024

Sarah Kinkade

"Transformation is metamorphosis; it's often messy and aims to create systems out of chaos."

Sarah Kinkade Mariana Ortiz-Reyes

Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation

June 8, 2022

Daniel Gloyd

"The Shakers’ artifacts allowed moments of silence and moments of song—balancing rationality with spirit in design."

Daniel Gloyd

Warming the User Experience: Lessons from America's first and most radical human-centered designers

May 9, 2024

Patrick Boehler

"The careful application of structured queries can reveal deeper insights than traditional research alone."

Patrick Boehler

Fishing for Real Needs: Reimagining Journalism Needs with AI

June 10, 2025

Andy Barraclough

"UX research teams spend significant time manually analyzing interviews, limiting capacity to focus on higher-value tasks."

Andy Barraclough Betsy Nelson

From Costly Complexity to Efficient Insights: Why UX Teams Are Switching To Voxpopme

September 23, 2024

Alexandra Schmidt

"The future of our technology cannot and should not rest solely on the ethics of individual designers."

Alexandra Schmidt

Why Ethics Can't Save Tech

November 18, 2022

Louis Rosenfeld

"If you don’t have any conflict, that means you have no trust."

Louis Rosenfeld

Discussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps

November 6, 2017

Mitchell Bernstein

"When you get stuck, fall back to the loop: observe, reflect, and make. Get out and talk to users."

Mitchell Bernstein

Organizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape

September 29, 2021