Last November I gave a flash talk called “Designing Accessibility for Everyone.” I want to write it up properly, because the idea keeps coming back to me.
The short version: accessibility isn’t a feature you build for a specific group of users. It’s a design philosophy that, when done well, makes things better for everyone.
The patterns repeat consistently enough that they’ve become a framework for me. The features created for people with disabilities end up changing how everyone uses a product. Curb cuts were designed for wheelchair users. Now every parent with a stroller uses them. Captions were built for deaf audiences. Now they’re how most people watch video in public. Accessible design expands who something works for, it doesn’t contract it.
For product teams, this is both a moral argument and a practical one. When you design for the people who need the most support, you end up with something stronger for the people who don’t.
This gets more urgent with AI.
AI agents are becoming a primary interface. They answer questions, complete tasks, communicate on behalf of products. And right now, most of them are built without accessibility as a requirement.
That’s a problem. And it’s also an opportunity.
One of the things I’ve been working on is how instruction files for AI agents can be written to make responses more accessible by default. Things like: plain language requirements, response length guidance, structure that works for screen readers, avoiding jargon without explanation. These aren’t hard constraints. They’re just good defaults that you encode once and benefit from everywhere.
Companies deploying AI agents can do this now. You don’t need a separate accessibility audit after the fact. You can bake it in at the instruction layer, before responses are ever generated.
The thesis is the same as it was for product design: if your agent works well for someone with a cognitive disability, it will work better for everyone. Clearer. Shorter. More structured. Easier to act on.
Accessible AI isn’t a niche consideration. It’s a quality signal. And it’s one most teams are skipping.
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