Designing for Everyone: 5 Accessibility Tips Every Designer Should KnowDesigning for Everyone: 5 Accessibility Tips Every Designer Should Know

When I worked on albert, BAFTA’s sustainability platform for the screen industry, meeting WCAG standards was an explicit goal. I came away with a line I’ve repeated in every team since: the product has to work for everyone who makes film and TV. That includes the producer reading on a cracked phone in bright sunlight, the editor who navigates entirely by keyboard, and the runner who’s colour-blind and has never mentioned it.

Accessibility isn’t a feature you add at the end. It’s a baseline, like spelling. Here are five things I check in every design review. None of them require a specialist, and all of them make the product better for everyone, not just the people we usually picture when we say “accessibility”.

1. Contrast is not a vibe

Light grey text on white looks elegant in Dribbble shots and is unreadable in real life. WCAG asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large text and UI elements like input borders. Check it with a plugin; don’t trust your expensive monitor.

2. Never let colour do the talking alone

Roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour vision deficiency. If the only thing telling someone a field is wrong is a red border, a lot of people won’t see the problem at all. Pair colour with an icon, a word, or both.

3. Design the focus state, don’t delete it

Lots of people never touch a mouse: keyboard users, switch users, people with a broken trackpad. The focus ring is their cursor. Designers often hide it because the browser default is ugly. The fix isn’t removing it; it’s designing a better one and putting it in the component library next to hover and pressed.

Try it on this page: press Tab a few times. Every link and button you land on should be obvious. If it isn’t, that’s a bug, and I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

4. Give every control a name and room to breathe

An icon-only button is a riddle for a screen reader unless it has an accessible label, and a 24px tap target is a riddle for anyone with large thumbs or a shaky bus ride. Aim for at least 44 by 44 points, and label icons in the design file so engineers know what to announce.

5. Write like you’re standing next to them

This one surprises people, but words are accessibility too. On the Carbon loans redesign, a real chunk of the work was rewriting decline and error messages that confused people, not drawing new UI. Plain language helps people with cognitive disabilities, people reading in a second language, and every stressed person trying to sort out their money at 11pm.

• Say what happened, why, and what to do next, in that order.
• Use the words your users use, not your internal ones.
• Write alt text that describes the purpose of the image, not just its pixels.

None of this makes design less creative. If anything, it makes it more honest. A beautiful screen that some people can’t use isn’t finished yet.