Jun 2025
What if your next million users were already trying to use your app, but couldn’t? The global disability market represents approximately 1.3 billion people, according to current 2025 estimates from the World Health Organization. This guide shows you how to reach them.
Digital accessibility focuses on ensuring that digital products work for everyone, regardless of ability. It means designing websites, mobile apps, and digital tools so they’re usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. It ensures that individuals using assistive technologies like screen readers, magnifiers, or alternative keyboards can access the same content and features as everyone else.
Accessibility transforms subjective “good design“ principles into objective, measurable criteria and formal requirements that work to ensure the millions of people with disabilities can use these tools. Accessibility is foundational to usability. As our friend and accessibility expert at Google told us, “If a product is inaccessible to millions, it fails the basic usability test.“
It’s important to remember that equal access is crucial for daily life, from applying for jobs to participating in online activities. Accessibility is not a privilege but a right.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are built upon four foundational principles (POUR):
Users must be able to perceive all the information presented on the screen, regardless of their sensory abilities. This means providing alternatives for content that a user might not be able to see or hear.
Users must be able to interact with all interface components and navigation elements. The interface cannot require an interaction that a user cannot perform.
Both the information presented and the operation of the user interface must be clear and consistent. Users should be able to comprehend the content and learn how to use the product without confusion.
Content must be created using standard conventions so that it can be reliably interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including current and future assistive technologies. Your product should remain accessible as technology evolves.
Each guideline has testable success criteria at three levels: A (minimum), AA (recommended standard), and AAA (enhanced). InspiringApps aims for Level AA and strives for Level AAA wherever possible to provide the most inclusive experience.
The core philosophy is about being intentionally inclusive. It’s guided by two key concepts:
At InspiringApps, this philosophy is a core value. We believe it’s about more than just checking boxes; it’s about building deeper empathy into our team and our products. As our Director of Brand & Marketing, Stephanie Mikuls, explains:
“Inclusivity is a long-term commitment and a way to deepen the brand beyond just messaging. This leads to more empathetic and effective designers and developers, resulting in truly better products.“
Ultimately, this approach allows us to build products for our clients that are more significant, “more sticky,“ and more useful to the widest possible audience.
Viewing digital accessibility as a compliance checkbox is a missed opportunity. Embracing accessibility is about good business.
As noted, the WHO’s latest figures confirm that over 1.3 billion people globally live with some form of disability. By creating products that are usable by everyone, you unlock access to a significant and loyal market segment that is often underserved. Consider that 71% of users with disabilities will immediately leave an inaccessible app, making accessibility critical for user retention.
Your brand’s values are a key differentiator in a competitive landscape. A public and genuine commitment to inclusive design builds trust and demonstrates that your company is dedicated to serving all members of the community. This fosters powerful brand loyalty among consumers who want to support businesses that reflect their values.
The benefits of accessible design extend to every single user. Just as a ramp on a sidewalk helps parents with strollers and travelers with luggage, features like high-contrast text are easier for everyone to read in bright sunlight, and video captions are essential for anyone in a noisy environment. When you focus on accessibility, you inherently create a more intuitive and user-friendly product for your entire audience.
While the strategic benefits are paramount, it’s also important to recognize the legal landscape. Accessibility lawsuits have jumped 64% since 2019. Under regulations like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), there is an increasing focus on mobile apps and the accessibility of their integrated AI features. Mitigating this legal risk is essential for ensuring your digital services are open to all.
While accessibility is essential for users with permanent disabilities, its benefits extend to every single person experiencing a temporary impairment or a limiting situation. By designing for the full spectrum of human experience, we create products that are more resilient, flexible, and valuable for everyone.
Good visual accessibility helps anyone who can’t rely solely on sight at a given moment.
Auditory accessibility provides alternatives for anyone who can’t hear audio clearly.
Motor accessibility supports anyone who has limited use of their hands or requires precision.
Cognitive accessibility helps reduce mental load, making interfaces easier for everyone to understand and use, especially when stressed or distracted.
By viewing accessibility through this broader lens, it becomes clear that it’s not about designing for a small subset of “other people.” It’s about planning for all of us in our many different states and contexts.
An accessible app is built with a suite of features that ensure everyone can perceive, understand, and operate it. While every app is different, there are key features we prioritize to create a truly inclusive experience.
These features ensure that information can be perceived visually and through non-visual means.
These features ensure that all users can control the app and move through it effectively.
These features ensure that rich content is accessible and that the app works well with the user’s own tools.
Mobile accessibility presents unique challenges and opportunities beyond traditional web design. These include touch-first interaction, platform-specific tools like VoiceOver and TalkBack, and the need to design for users who are often multitasking in various environments.
Our team uses tools like Figma plugins to test color contrast and simulate color blindness directly within our workflow, ensuring accessibility is baked into the design process rather than retrofitted.
This is an important concern. Mobile accessibility services require broad permissions (like viewing your screen or actions) to do their job, such as reading text aloud or creating custom buttons. You should only grant these permissions to applications from trusted, reputable developers that clearly explain why they need them.
Accessibility isn’t a final checkpoint; it’s a mindset that deepens as you move from concept to launch. The key is to build for the widest range of users from the start, not retrofit later.
Guidelines are just the starting point. True accessibility requires thinking about the real user experience. A blind user doesn’t just want to know that a logo says “Google”—they might want to know it’s blue or that it’s a link to the homepage. This is where the concept of “build for one, scale to many” becomes critical, and it starts with your core design elements.
As our UI/UX Designer, Becca Collins, notes:
“As designers, we are responsible for ensuring our apps are fully accessible so no one is excluded from these critical aspects of daily life.”
Knowing your users is paramount, but it isn’t always perfect. Most teams don’t get to test with disabled users as much as needed. If you can’t get real people, educate yourself.
This hands-on testing is driven by a core value: We add alt text to every image and navigate our apps meticulously, not just because WCAG requires it, but because we believe technology should be accessible to anyone who wants to use it.
Inclusive design creates better products. The “My Meals, My Way” app demonstrates this principle—by prioritizing features like Dynamic Type support, voice navigation, and high-contrast design from day one, it achieved a 4.5-star App Store rating and a “Best New Technology” award because we focused on the end-user from day one. Read the full case study and the inclusive design deep dive.
Ultimately, real accessibility happens when you commit to the user, not when you just check boxes on a list.
Both major mobile platforms are rapidly advancing their accessibility capabilities, with each new operating system release bringing meaningful improvements for users with disabilities.
Apple announced new accessibility features coming later this year, including Accessibility Nutrition Labels, which will provide more detailed information for apps and games on the App Store. These labels will show users which accessibility features an app supports before downloading, from VoiceOver and Voice Control to Larger Text and Reduced Motion support.
Beyond app discovery, Apple is expanding accessibility across devices. Magnifier is coming to Mac to make the physical world more accessible for users with low vision. Braille Access is an all-new experience that turns iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro into a full-featured braille note taker. Eye-tracking navigation and music haptics that let deaf users experience songs through vibrations round out the platform’s inclusive evolution.
Google is leveraging AI to transform Android accessibility. TalkBack, Android’s screen reader, now lets you ask Gemini about what’s in images and what’s on your screen. Users can get descriptions of photos and ask follow-up questions about brands, colors, or shopping details—all processed intelligently through AI.
Chrome automatically recognizes these types of PDFs, so you can highlight, copy, and search for text like any other page and use your screen reader to read them through new OCR capabilities.
Meanwhile, Expressive Captions’ new duration feature gets even more context of what’s being said in the audio and video on your phone, capturing nuances like extended sounds and non-verbal cues.
AI is creating breakthroughs in accessibility that support highly individualized needs and enable greater autonomy. A few developments to watch:
Personalized text-to-speech is becoming more sophisticated. AI can now generate synthetic voices from text, as demonstrated by a local representative who lost her voice due to Parkinson’s and uses AI to recreate her voice for public speaking engagements.
Real-time image description is changing how people with visual impairments interact with visual content. AI can instantly describe photos, documents, and live camera feeds, providing detailed explanations of scenes, text, and objects as they appear.
Empathetic voice interfaces are being designed to detect and react to user emotions like anxiety. This could significantly enhance usability for those relying on voice commands, though the approach is being viewed cautiously.
As many in the accessibility community have aptly stated, “Human testing is paramount.“ The technology is promising, but real users still need to validate what actually works.
Translating these principles into practice can feel daunting, but starting is easier than you think. A successful journey begins with a few prioritized steps.
Design for the margins. Color between the lines. Create better experiences for everyone. Explore our work.
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