Web accessibility is about making sure that websites and apps can be used and understood by everybody, regardless of which device or screen someone is using, their ability, circumstance, or background. In the UK, around 18% of the population are disabled (2021 Census), that’s 9.8 million people in the UK alone. Plus we estimate that when you include factors that are generally not associated with the word ‘disability’ – such as neurodiversity, speaking English as a second language and colour blindness – that it’s probably far closer to 50% of the population who have specific web accessibility needs.

Inclusive Design encompasses accessibility, but is even broader still – it is about making sure that people feel welcome within an experience, feel represented and catered for – it covers a broad range of themes within the world of diversity and inclusion such as gender, neurodiversity, ethnicity and sexuality. It’s hard to put a statistic around the number of people who are most commonly affected by exclusion, but we’re confident that it will be an incredibly high percentage as the majority of people have experienced some form of exclusion at some point in their lives.

Oh, and did we mention that everybody benefits from accessible and inclusive design? The brilliance of these two practices is that they make experiences better for everyone.

From June 28th 2025, it will be law for both public and private sector websites and apps to be at least AA accessible (Not sure what AA means? Download our cheatsheet). It’s already law to be at least AA for the public sector and organisations aimed towards people with accessibility needs – such as gov.uk or RNIB – and many public sites will aim for the even higher standard of AAA.

We are part of the VCCP Group – a network of agencies that pride themselves on engaging with customers and audiences of businesses big and small – and we are hugely passionate about brands and the strength a brand gives to your business and its presence. We always strive to bring brands to life within digital experiences and to bring the same creativity you would use in advertising and communications, to the digital product design world.

Sadly, accessible design has a bit of a negative reputation for being boring and constraining brand creativity. However, we believe that brands should never be compromised, and neither should accessible or inclusive design – they are equally important to really engage all of your customers properly.

Then combine this with a recent survey by Nice that revealed 37% of consumers will abandon a brand due to poor customer experience. More consideration and application of accessible design principles is not just about benefiting the 21% of the population with web accessibility needs. Failing to prioritise user-friendly experiences will harm customer satisfaction and will damage your brand reputation.

Accessibility is often treated as a compliance issue or technical task, overlooked in favour of aesthetics being the draw for people to engage with your brand. However, great accessibility and inclusivity doesn’t compromise aesthetics. It works with it, and compliments it, while putting in the right functionality for your business to be accessible to more people – if anything, it elevates your brand’s appeal beyond aesthetic attraction alone. Beyond legal requirements, it broadens your brand’s reach, improves the customer experience, and boosts loyalty, advocacy, and confidence among a wider audience.

You will see in our portfolio of work that this is never an optional extra to cater for “other users”. We consider it as a core element of the design process. Inclusive design helps us to determine decisions, and solutions for better, seamless experiences for everyone.

Everything we create has accessibility and inclusive design baked in, and some projects require dedicated effort to make sure that the experience is open to all. Here are a few examples:

• Creating an accessible egg hiding experience within Google Maps for Cadbury Worldwide Hide: including screen-reader support, tab indexes throughout and a full set of keyboard shortcuts within the map experience – allowing users to hide or find their egg without ever using a mouse.
• Designing a fully accessible redesign of Saga.co.uk: Extensive considerations such as ability to magnify text without breaking the components, strong colour contrast throughout and ensuring touch-friendly button sizes – were made to ensure that the redesign of the Holidays and Cruises sections, underpinned by our new Design System, was an inclusive and user-friendly experience, especially for their older target audience.
• Making everyone feel included within My Cadbury Era: Working with a leading LGBTQ+ charity, members of Mondelẽz International’s diversity and inclusion network and of the VCCP DE&I Collective to ensure this activation was as inclusive as possible – especially of skin tone and gender options.

These topics can sound great, but it’s often difficult to understand what it means, partially, to apply to day-to-day work.

Firstly, accessible web design is all about ensuring that everything we create adheres to WCAG standards. Ok cool, but what does that really mean? We’ve made our lives simpler, and instead of asking everyone in our team to know the WCAG website inside out, we’ve created an Accessible Design and Content Checklist – so that we can easily follow the 40 design and content specific guidelines.

Secondly, inclusive design is less straightforward, because there are no specific guidelines to follow or criteria to adhere to. Instead it’s about including people from your target audience within your process. For example, for My Cadbury Era when deciding on what gender options to offer, we worked with people in the LGBTQ+ community to make the best design decisions. Inclusive Design is about doing everything you can to include relevant people in your design process, so that the ultimate design output is as inclusive as possible for the people using it.

Thirdly, we test our designs with both people who have accessibility needs, and with people from a range of backgrounds and cultural groups – so that we find out whether a wide range of people can both use your experience effectively, and find out whether they feel included at the same time.

Finally, the most important thing that we do at Bernadette, is advocate for and evangelise the practice of accessible and inclusive design throughout the process – we educate people on why it’s important, and create content and run activities to help people empathise with those who have accessibility needs, or are experiencing exclusion. This way people feel passionate about making good design decisions, and view it as a positive element of their work, rather than resist it.

We’ve created a few documents to make it easier to start your journey into accessible and inclusive design – please help yourself and feel free to share!

Watch our introduction video by Steph Marques, our Head of UX who leads our Accessibility Collective and also sits on the BIMA Inclusive Design Council. Steph’s work in this area has transformed brand-customer relationships through many brands’ digital experiences and she has been recognised with the Oystercatchers ‘Champion for Change’ award.

Whenever Global Accessibility Awareness Day rolls around, we see it less as a reminder — and more as an opportunity. A chance to bring a conversation into the spotlight that, for us, never really stops. It’s a chance to pause, reflect, and re-centre the conversation—not just around compliance or code, but around creativity. Because here’s the thing: accessibility requirements aren’t chores to be grudgingly addressed. They’re often missed opportunities within the design space hiding in plain sight. Yet somehow, certain myths persist.

Chief among them is this old chestnut: “Accessibility is just a checkbox to meet legal requirements.” Except it’s not. We understand that accessibility isn’t fringe—it’s mainstream. One in five people in the UK has a disability. That’s not a niche audience. That’s over 14 million potential customers(1) and a huge slice of your core audience.

It’s the world, as it is—not as it’s been narrowly designed for by a legacy design culture that centres convenience over inclusion, aesthetics over access, and assumes usability for one means usability for all.

When we dismiss accessibility as a legal hoop to jump through, we don’t just let people down — we shut them out entirely. And in doing so, we limit what design can be: not a tool for connection, but a barrier to entry.
We also lower our own creative ceiling. We cut off routes to better UX, smarter content, sharper design. At Bernadette, we believe accessible design isn’t about compromise. It’s about making things better, for more people, in more situations.

So this Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we’re dispelling the myths, rethinking the defaults — and pointing the way toward building digital experiences that actually work for everyone.

Another persistent myth is that “accessibility is simply for people with poor vision”. It’s true that when some people think of accessibility, they might very well think of screen readers, text size and contrast. And that’s about it. Vision in the narrowest sense of the word.

But here’s the truth: visual accessibility isn’t just about blindness. It spans everything from colour blindness to cataracts, partial sight to temporary eye strain — and even environmental factors like bright sunlight, glare, or tricky viewing angles in a moving car. It’s about making sure people can actually see, scan, and understand what you’ve put in front of them — regardless of how perfect their eyesight is (or isn’t) at that time, or where they happen to be.

2,250 out of every 50,000 website visitors have a colour vision deficiency(2). So, what does good visual accessibility look like?

• It looks like high-contrast colour combinations that work in bright sunlight and for users with red–green colour blindness.
• It looks like text that scales smoothly without shattering the layout.
• It looks like image alt tags that describe rather than apologise.
• It looks like a site that holds up under a magnifier, on a projector, on a cracked phone screen.

A smarter way to think about these applications is that it isn’t just altruism. Rather, it’s smart digital hygiene. Better contrast is better SEO. Clearer structure is lower bounce rates. Scalable, readable content is a broader audience who sticks around longer.

When you build with sight in mind—all types of sight—you’re not muddying the picture or diluting the design, you’re sharpening it. This is a clearer lens through which to look at the visual aspects of accessibility design. It’s about having an eye for the different kinds of visual constraints that need to be catered for in order to make your content not just visible, but visible to everyone.

A user’s ability to hear—whether affected by a hearing impairment or a noisy environment—is a crucial factor in accessibility design. And yet, the myth persists: “As long as we’ve got audio, we’re covered.” This assumes that rich, well-produced audio —podcasts, voiceovers, sound cues, music—is enough. That if it sounds good, it is good. But that’s only true if everyone can actually hear it.

The reality? Many users are deaf or hard of hearing. Others process information visually, or are simply in environments where sound isn’t an option — like packed train carriages, busy offices, or the middle of the night with a baby asleep next to them. In fact, 75% of social media videos are watched on mute(3) — meaning if your content depends on audio to make sense, it’s already missing most of your audience.

And if your content doesn’t include captions, transcripts, or visual equivalents of those audio cues? It might be beautifully produced—but it’s effectively silent. Simply put, if your content only works with sound, it doesn’t fully work as well as it could.

So what does better sound accessibility actually look like?

• It means adding subtitles to every video, not just the polished campaigns.
• It means including transcripts for audio—interviews, podcasts, explainers—so users can scan, quote, revisit.
• It means designing in clear visual prompts for sounds — whether that’s a persistent alert, a soft visual cue, or a notification that’s easy to spot without relying on audio alone.
• And where possible, offering alternative formats—from written recaps to text-based customer service chats.

These fixes are simple, scalable, and highly effective. They improve comprehension, increase engagement by opening the door to millions more users. And when these accessibility components are done well, it ensures that brand communications still ring true —even when the sound is turned all the way down.

Here’s a myth that quietly creeps into design decisions all the time: “Everyone uses tech the same way.” Click the button. Swipe the screen. Tap to confirm. Easy, right?

Well, that depends. This kind of thinking assumes every user has full dexterity, steady hands, and the physical ease to interact with digital devices exactly as intended.

But that’s not reality.

Many people live with motor impairments that affect how they use tech—from Parkinson’s and cerebral palsy to arthritis, MS, or temporary injuries. In the UK, mobility is the most frequently reported impairment—affecting 48% of disabled individuals(4). Some cannot use a mouse, while others rely entirely on keyboard navigation, voice commands, or adaptive hardware to get around a screen.

When forms are fiddly, buttons too small, or interactions rely on complex gestures, the experience becomes frustrating — or flat-out inaccessible. And the cost is real: 72% of users have abandoned a purchase because of poor accessibility(5).

So what does accessible interaction design look like?

• It looks like clearly labelled, easy-to-reach buttons that don’t require pixel-perfect precision.
• It looks like keyboard-friendly navigation that moves smoothly through forms, menus, and buttons — without needing a mouse.
• It looks like reduced motion requirements, with no need for swiping, dragging, or two-fingered anything.
• It looks like input fields that don’t time out mid-entry — especially when typing takes longer.

These aren’t fancy extras. They’re design basics that widen access, boost usability, and remove needless friction for everyone—including someone tapping with a thumb on a bumpy train. Because when digital design assumes a single way of interacting, it doesn’t just fail some people—it shrinks your entire audience.

Another myth that quietly shapes digital projects is the assumption that general audiences are fully up-to-speed with technical concepts and possess flawless reading comprehension: the idea that “our audience is tech-savvy and hyper literate.”

Low literacy rates, second-language speakers, and users with learning difficulties are everywhere—in fact, 8,200 out of every 50,000 site visitors in the UK have low literacy7. But there’s no neat metric that tells you why someone gave up — whether it was a wall of jargon, a confusing instruction, or a checkout flow that left them second-guessing their next step.

Accessibility here isn’t just about who can technically click through your experience. It’s about who feels confident doing it. This demands a clear and considered approach to UX copywriting—optimising language to perform across a wide and varied reading audience.

So what does better look like?

• Simplicity: Use short, direct sentences with everyday words—without sacrificing meaning or tone.
• Consistency: Stick to familiar terms and patterns across all pages to reduce cognitive load.
• Clarity: Prioritise instructions, CTAs, and key messages visually and verbally—no burying the lead.
• Supportiveness: Provide context when needed (tooltips, prompts, hints) so users aren’t left guessing.

Because accessible language doesn’t mean dumbing things down—it means opening things up. Making every message easier to follow, every action simpler to take, every user more confident in what they’re doing. It’s about writing in a way that works for everyone—just like this.

Got a business challenge that’s looking for an innovative digital solution? Or, perhaps you’re interested in joining our collective of digital pioneers? Maybe you just want to know a little more about what we do. In any case, we’d love to hear from you.

Want to know how your digital experience stacks up—not just for ‘ideal’ users, but for real people, in the real world? Let’s find out.

Book an accessibility audit with Bernadette. We’ll show you where the barriers are, where the opportunities lie, and how a few smart changes could open up your brand to a much wider audience.

Just honest, practical insight—and a clear path to making your digital spaces stronger, sharper, and more inclusive.

1. https://wearepurple.org.uk/understanding-the-purple-pound-market/
2. https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/
3. https://digiday.com/sponsored/75-percent-of-people-watch-mobile-videos-on-mute/
4. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9602/CBP-9602.pdf
5. https://wearepurple.org.uk/understanding-the-purple-pound-market/
6. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employment-prospects-for-neurodiverse-people-set-to-be-boosted-with-launch-of-new-expert-panel
7. https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/
8. https://clickawaypound.com/downloads/

They discussed Cadbury Design Systems, Accessibility and My Cadbury Era – the winner of The Inclusive Design Award at the 2024 BIMA Awards which was recognised for its innovative approach to Gen-AI powered experiences.

Watch the full interview now: https://lnkd.in/gKRUYYP2

hosted on:  BIMA website and on the BIMA YouTube channel

Design is hugely wide-ranging, from website and apps, to communications design from social posts and print adverts, to presentation decks and emails — and of course much beyond this too.

But what does ‘accessible and inclusive design’ actually mean?

Accessibility is all about giving people the ability to access information and services by allowing them to better use and understand a design. You may be forgiven for thinking this principle applies simply to people with certain disabilities — which it does — but in reality accessible design benefits everyone. Afterall, no one likes yellow text on a white background right?

Inclusive design is even broader, and is all about making sure that no one feels excluded, perhaps by the language or images used, or the form fields available for gender selection, as examples.

So, to make things a little easier for you to get started, or continue on your journey to deliver accessible and inclusive design, we’ve put together a set of pointers for you to ‘Bear in mind’ when creating design work…

We hope these pointers help you to make improvements to how you approach design going forwards, and if you’re ever not sure the best approach, just ask for help – that’s what inclusive design is all about.

Enjoy!

Bernadette Accessibility Collective  x  VCCP DE&I Collective  x  Girl&Bear