Why Accessibility Matters in Digital Experimentation
Accessibility has often been treated as a checklist in experimentation.
Meeting WCAG compliance, providing descriptive alt text, and ensuring content is navigable by keyboard are important foundations. However, true accessibility requires a larger perspective.
It’s about creating digital experiences that are usable and inclusive for all users, not just meeting the minimum requirements.
“An estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. This represents 16% of the world’s population, or 1 in 6 of us.”
Add that to the many more who encounter temporary or situational accessibility needs, and it becomes clear that accessibility is not a niche concern. It is central to delivering meaningful digital experiences.
Beyond WCAG Compliance: Designing for Visible and Invisible Disabilities
Accessibility is therefore not only about compliance with standards. It is about building experiences that reflect the diversity of human needs, both visible and invisible.
A Personal Perspective on Accessibility Barriers
A recent personal experience brought this into focus for me. After breaking my ankle, I began to encounter challenges in both digital and physical environments that I had not fully considered before.
One example was at Cambridge North station, where a broken lift left me facing more than thirty steps with crutches.
Despite planning my journey in advance, no travel app had flagged the issue.
The alternative offered by staff was to travel to a different station and return by taxi, which highlighted how poorly the experience had accounted for temporary accessibility needs.
This demonstrated that accessibility is not limited to those with permanent disabilities.
It affects anyone who encounters barriers through injury, illness, or situational factors. When these barriers exist, the result is immediate frustration and exclusion, which no product or service should accept as an outcome.
The Role of Accessibility in A/B Testing and Experimentation
From an experimentation perspective, accessibility cannot be an afterthought.
Every test, whether it involves navigation, content design, or interaction patterns, presents an opportunity to identify barriers and remove them.
Accessible designs broaden reach, improve customer experience, and often enhance usability for everyone.
In a landscape where one in four people will experience an accessibility need during their lifetime, the commercial case is as strong as the ethical one.
Good digital services are born from a deep understanding of the diverse needs and challenges faced by their users, service providers, and people affected by them.
Everyone working in digital plays a critical role in uncovering this understanding and weaving it through the design process, from defining the problem to crafting the solutions.
Regulation and Opportunity
The European Accessibility Act reinforces the urgency of this shift.
For businesses, compliance is now a requirement, but accessibility is about more than meeting legal requirements. It’s an ethical responsibility to ensure that all users, regardless of ability, can engage fully with digital experiences.
At the same time, embedding accessibility into experimentation strategies can enhance usability for everyone and unlock potential opportunities for broader reach and engagement.
Embedding Accessibility in Experimentation Workflows
At Creative CX, our work focuses on ensuring experimentation reflects the diversity of real customer journeys.
Prioritising accessibility is part of that commitment.
It is not only about removing barriers but also about creating resilient experiences that serve customers better, regardless of circumstance.
Accessibility is not a box to be ticked. It is a mindset to be applied across every experiment and every stage of the design process.
Those who embrace this approach will not only meet regulatory expectations but will also create experiences that are genuinely inclusive and customer-centric.
How Creative CX Supports Accessible Experimentation
Good experimentation begins with understanding all your users.
We make accessibility a core part of the experimentation process. Through our dedicated ‘Accessibility UX Review’, we use our Problem-First approach to uncover where accessibility pitfalls exist across digital platforms. This includes:
- An Accessibility UX Review, measuring against AA and AAA and WCAG guidelines.
- Usability testing with vulnerable audiences to reveal real-world barriers.
- Quantifying findings with analytics to understand how many users are likely impacted.
We also embed accessibility considerations into the experimentation workflow itself, ensuring every test we run meets accessibility standards.
Get in touch to explore how we can make your experimentation programme more inclusive, insightful, and impactful.
