Exclusion Epidemic Hits Web Despite Good Intentions
A startling new proposal suggests that even the most well-meaning designers are unintentionally creating websites that exclude millions of users. The core problem: designers simply have too much to remember.
"Designers are good people. I have never heard a designer say, 'I don’t care if somebody can’t read this text,'" states the proposal’s author, a UX specialist. Yet exclusion persists—from unreadable text to confusing interfaces.
Why Good Design Goes Bad
The author points to life-or-death stakes. In a favorite essay, Aral Balkan notes that even a bus timetable app can cause someone to miss a daughter’s birthday or a dying grandmother’s final goodbye. "Pretty much everything we design can affect life events and death events," Balkan writes.
The frustrating question remains: Why do some designs still exclude people? We already know that not everybody sees, hears, thinks, or moves the same way.
The answer, the author argues, is cognitive overload. "Designers are expected to remember all of that guidance, plus all of the accessibility guidance, plus so much more. It is too much."
A Familiar Heuristic, Tweaked for Action
Enter Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics from the mid-1990s. Specifically, heuristic № 6: Recognition rather than Recall. For users, the information needed should be visible or easily retrievable. The proposal suggests tweaking that for designers themselves.
"Let’s say that the information required to produce the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed," the author explains. In other words, make it easier to recognize accessibility issues while designing.
The author recommends the book "A Web for Everyone — Designing Accessible User Experiences" by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery as a practical resource.
Background
Accessibility has long been a cornerstone of web design, yet compliance remains low. According to WebAIM, over 90% of home pages have detectable accessibility issues. Designers often cite lack of training or time. Nielsen’s heuristics, while widely taught, focus on user recall—not designer recall.
The proposal builds on decades of research but offers a fresh lens: shift the burden from memorizing guidelines to designing systems that prompt designers at the point of creation.
What This Means
If adopted, this approach could transform design workflows. Instead of post-hoc audits, teams would embed accessibility checkpoints directly into design tools. The author believes this could reduce exclusion without requiring designers to become accessibility experts.
"We don’t need designers to memorize everything—we need design environments that surface the right information at the right time," the proposal concludes. For the millions who encounter barriers daily, that shift can't come soon enough.
— Reporting on the latest from A List Apart's accessibility discussion.