The Paradox of Good Designers and Excluded Users
In the world of web design, there is a puzzling contradiction: designers are fundamentally good people who never intentionally exclude anyone, yet many websites and apps remain inaccessible to a large portion of users. No designer would ever say, “I don’t care if someone can’t read this text,” or “It’s not my fault if this device is unusable.” Yet, we’ve all witnessed situations where tiny text, confusing navigation, or complex gestures leave people baffled or unable to complete basic tasks. This isn’t about bad intentions—it’s about a gap between awareness and action.
It’s Not Malice, It’s Overload
The root cause is not a lack of empathy, but a deluge of information. Designers are expected to master a vast array of topics: user experience, visual design, front-end development, performance optimization, and, of course, accessibility. With so many guidelines, best practices, and heuristics to remember, even the most conscientious professional can overlook critical accessibility factors. The result? Designs that function beautifully for some but create barriers for others—people with visual impairments, hearing difficulties, cognitive differences, or motor disabilities.
Accessibility as a Matter of Life and Death
Some might ask, “Is this really a life-or-death issue?” The emphatic answer is yes. As Aral Balkan argues in his essay This Is All There Is, nearly every designed system can impact life events—and sometimes death. Consider a simple bus timetable app. If the interface is confusing or the text too small, someone might miss their daughter’s fifth birthday party. Worse, they might miss the chance to say goodbye to a dying grandmother. These are not hypotheticals; they are real consequences of design oversights. Accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a fundamental requirement that affects human well-being.
The Problem of Too Much to Remember
We already know the basics: not everyone sees perfectly, hears perfectly, thinks the same way, or moves the same way. Yet inclusive design still fails in practice. Why? Because there’s simply too much to recall. Designers are expected to juggle decades of accumulated wisdom—from A List Apart articles to WCAG guidelines—and apply it all simultaneously. The human brain has limits. When overwhelmed, we fall back on patterns and heuristics, leading to designs that work for the “average” user but exclude outliers.
Applying Recognition Over Recall for Designers
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, first published in the mid‑1990s, offer a solution. Heuristic №6, “Recognition rather than Recall,” states that the user should be able to see or easily retrieve information needed to complete a task. We can repurpose this principle for designers: instead of expecting designers to recall every accessibility guideline, we should make that information recognizable—visible or easily retrievable during the design process. This shifts the burden from memory to environment.
A Practical Step: Using Heuristics to Spot Issues
One way to operationalize this is to integrate accessibility heuristics directly into design tools and workflows. For example, a checklist or overlay that flags common pitfalls—like low color contrast, missing alt text, or small touch targets—can prompt designers to address issues before they become embedded in the final product. Books like A Web for Everyone by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery provide excellent frameworks, but they need to be translated into actionable, at‑a‑glance references.
Example: Heuristic 6 in Action
Imagine a designer working on a registration form. Instead of trying to recall WCAG success criteria for form labels, they could have a sidebar that lists common mistakes: “Are labels visible? Are error messages clear? Is the contrast ratio sufficient?” By making this information present in the design environment, the designer can recognize an issue and fix it immediately. This reduces cognitive load and increases the likelihood of an accessible outcome.
Conclusion: Making Accessibility Visible
The path forward is not about blaming designers; it’s about supporting them. We must acknowledge that good people can create bad websites when the system fails to provide the right cues. By embedding accessibility heuristics into our tools and processes—effectively turning “recall” into “recognition”—we can close the gap between intention and reality. The result will be a web that truly serves everyone, from the first click to the last.