Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Slides are hitting a brick wall; video clips make findings much more interactive and engaging for stakeholders."
Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex KnollRepository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
March 9, 2022
"How we orient ourselves to the future impacts how we experience the present."
Nicole AleongFuture Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
March 26, 2024
"Disruptive innovation doesn’t happen overnight; you have to practice, fail, learn, and have patience."
Jeff GothelfInnovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
"If you don't have dedicated accessibility people, start grassroots by building empathy and rallying teams around user stories."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"There’s a lot of pressure on ops people and managers to make everything perfect all the time for staff."
Tess DixonC'mon Get Happy
September 29, 2021
"Building a great culture means caring for individuals and creating rituals like recognition and shared learning."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
"Innovation is about being fearless, breaking rules, and refusing to stop at the way things have always been done."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"Ratios always start on the premise of spreading people too thin, which is not a great way to get success."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"It depends was the most common answer to how do you know what you’re doing is working."
Rachael Greene Alison DavisBuilding a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)
October 2, 2025