Enhancing Web Design: Recognizing Accessibility Issues Now

For people who make websites
I want to discuss accessibility because it is the most important thing for making websites. Other A List Apart articles give you innovation and insight. This article will give you homework. These are just my personal views, but they’re pretty good.
Build expertise in content strategy, UX/UI, data communication, or learning design with Northwestern’s online MS in Information Design & Strategy.
A Book Apart: Brief books for people who make websites.
I want to start off with a couple of statements, and you will agree:
The first question is, “Is this life-or-death stuff?” The answer is, “Yes.” In my favorite essay, This Is All There Is, Aral Balkan makes the point that pretty much everything that we design can affect life events and death events. Aral gives the example of how even a straightforward bus timetable app can affect life and death events, if we design it badly:
The next—and frustrating—question is, “Why do some designs still exclude people?” After all, we know that:
I think the answer is that there’s too much to recall. Consider, if you will, the wide variety of topics that A List Apart articles cover. Designers are expected to remember all of that guidance, plus all of the accessibility guidance, plus so much more. It is too much.
I’d like to point toward one possible solution, starting from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. These are from the mid-1990s, and—although there’s a good chance that you, gentle reader, are a lot younger than that—please bear with me.
Seeing as the problem is that there’s too much to recall, I want to look at heuristic № 6, “Recognition rather than Recall.” Jakob Nielsen said that for users, information required to use the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. I suggest we tweak that to make life easier for designers. Let’s say that the information required to produce the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. In other words, let’s make it easier to recognise accessibility issues while we’re designing.
How are we going to do that? I really like the book A Web for Everyone—Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. I really like this book not only because it includes a quote from me—actually two quotes, but I don’t like to boast—but because it includes personas that are perfect for helping us to recognise accessibility issues. That’s the good news. The even better news is that these personas are available now for free on the companion website to the book What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility, again by Sarah Horton, with David Sloan this time.
I’m going to introduce you to these personas now:
I want to throw one more persona at you now, because, well, A List Apart readers are overachievers. One of my favorite authors, Cennydd Bowles—who literally wrote the book on Future Ethics—says to create Personas Non Grata. In other words, every time we design something, we have to think about what a bad guy could do with that thing, and whom that might affect.
To actually use these personas while designing, I like what Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher in Design for Real Life call the Designated Dissenter: for each project that you work on, one of your teams should be responsible for asking, “Will this work for Vishnu?”, “How’s Trevor going to get on with this?”, and so on.
Then, once you’ve used the personas to recognise the accessibility issues, you can look up the guidelines for whichever platforms you’re designing for:
I told you in the introduction of this article that I would give you homework. You thought I was joking. So, here’s your homework: I want you to grab the personas from the Know About Accessibility website, and use them throughout every design project to help you recognise accessibility issues while you work—and reclaim design for everyone.
NOTE: This article is based on “Recognise,” my five-minute presentation from Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Dublin’s Defuse (Design for Use) event in 2025.
Alan Dalton worked for Ireland’s National Disability Authority for eight and a half years, mostly as Accessibility Development Advisor. He later wrote a trilogy of web accessibility articles for the 24 ways advent calendar: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven’t Read Them, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1—for People Who Haven’t Read the Update, and Future Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Can’t Wait to Read Them. More recently, he created Authors Apart and Authors Simple Steps to help web designers and developers find books from two much-loved publishers.
Self-service kiosks are no longer just a trend they’re becoming an essential part of modern business operations. From reducing wait times and cutting operational costs to providing customers with faster, more personalized service, kiosks are reshaping industries like retail, banking, healthcare, and hospitality. With the right design and technology, they don’t just improve efficiency they also create a seamless and satisfying customer experience. Truly a smart step for businesses that want to stay competitive in today’s digital-first world
Long-range FPV is one of the most peaceful and rewarding parts of the hobby. Instead of tight freestyle lines, you cruise over fields, forests and coastlines, covering distances that would be impossible with a regular drone. It is also the style that demands the most planning, because the farther you go, the less room for error. The core of any long-range build is efficiency. Larger propellers, typically 7 inches or more, combined with low-KV motors and a high-capacity battery, give the best flight time. Many pilots choose a 6S or higher-voltage pack, often in a lithium-ion format, because Li-ion cells offer more energy per gram than standard LiPo. A well-built long-range drone can fly for twenty minutes or more, depending on weight and style. The control link is the n