Accessible design is important, but is it the same as inclusive design? In this video, we'll tease apart the difference between these two. Web accessibility is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium as, "Websites, tools, and technologies, which are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them."


This means that people with disabilities can equally perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web without barriers. Now, UX Accessibility is absolutely not limited to web design, but UX Accessibility means that any user experience, including physical, digital, service design, can be experienced by people of all abilities.


It's also not limited just to people with lifelong disabilities. Tech accessibility means a design can be used by people of all abilities. So acknowledging that everyone has limits to their abilities, and those limits can change at any time. So accessibility is a goal, a destination. Inclusive design is how we get to that destination.


In comparison to accessible design, inclusive design is a series of design methodologies that focuses on two things. One, understanding, and two, enabling people of all backgrounds and abilities. This also includes accessibility, but it covers a broad spectrum of differences as well, like age, culture, economic status, education, geographic location, language, among many others.


An inclusive design as a noun is one that accounts for all of these differences. How do you understand people of all backgrounds and abilities? Well, there's no one way to do it, but I can tell you this, it's not by perspective-taking. Perspective-taking, or imagining yourself in someone else's shoes, is a mental exercise fraught with bias.


Because when you imagine yourself in someone else's shoes, you're still yourself, with all of your own past experiences, expectations, hopes, and dreams, envisioning what you might do if placed in different circumstances. And to quote one of our UX Mantras, "You are not the user." Instead of perspective-taking, opt for perspective-getting, which is actually talking to and observing people who are currently excluded or who might differ from your typical user base.


After all, there might be a very good reason they aren't typical users, like social pressures, familial concerns, or societal and systemic issues, but you can't uncover these reasons with imagination, you uncover them with data. Learn from the people who are the experts of their own lives. Use qualitative research methods to build a deeper understanding of the audience that you'd like to serve.


While it might feel overwhelming, the best place to start is by identifying who might be excluded or who might have a hard time accessing or using your services. As for how you might enable people of all backgrounds and abilities, remember that inclusive design is about that, enablement. It's not about creating a single design that is perfect in all ways, it's about creating many ways for people to engage, to equally perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute.


And sometimes, meeting very different user needs means having more than one design. At the end of the day, everyone is unique. And while it's not feasible to create an individually tailored design for every single person in the world, any step we can take to make designs usable for a new group of people means gaining new customers, a win for underserved communities, a win for businesses, a win for all.


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