Design for Accessibility

Design Guidelines for Connected Hardware

THE ASK
At Accenture, accessibility-for-all was a core business objective for many of our clients. As one of the world’s leading technology companies, designing for accessibility should also be a moral obligation. However, there are no accessibility standards for designing physical, connected products and spaces that exist within a service ecosystem. How do we make thoughtful design and engineering decisions when there are no guidelines? We create our own. @Accenture

  • We created comprehensive hardware accessibility guidelines for engineers and designers new to accessibility principles. Centered on six foundational principles, the guidelines support decision-making at every stage of design and development. Beyond instructions, we provided context to highlight the importance of accessibility and inclusive design. As the first initiative of its kind at Accenture, this effort showcased our team’s dedication to advancing hardware accessibility across a global workforce of 750,000.

  • “Justin’s dedication to practicing and educating his team on inclusive design principles is apparent, and how he speaks to the value and need to broader audiences is compelling and infectious.”

    -Accenture Industry X Managing Director

  • As a passionate advocate for accessible design, I conceived and led this initiative at Accenture. Despite limited resources - just six weeks and one senior designer - I secured funding and created a concise, impactful guide. The result empowers designers and engineers to approach problem-solving with greater empathy, fostering more inclusive solutions.

OVERALL APPROACH
With limited time and resources, we focused on mobility and sensory disabilities, drawing inspiration from industry leaders like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. By aligning with established digital guidelines like WCAG, we reinterpreted core accessibility principles for hardware, grounding our design approach in proven methodologies. You can find the PDF here: Design for Accessibility

A slide that has square grids, each with an accessibility stat. The title of the slide is "Accessibility Numbers". Examples of stats include, 1 billion people live with some form of disability."
Slide title: Inclusive Design versus Design for Accessibility. This slide talks about how human centric design is the overall umbrella for inclusive design and design for accessibility, and accessibility is a product of inclusive design.
Slide title: There are no design standards for physical products, let alone connected ones. There is an image on the slide of a linear graph with icons representing buildings screens and hardware products and illustrates a gap in standards for produc
This is a slide from a deck with a purple gradient background, with white text on top that says: "There are no accessibility guidelines for designing physical connected products that exist within a service ecosystem...We create our own guidelines."
Slide title: Our Six Design fo Accessibility Guidelines. 1 - co-create with your community. 2 - Design for permanent disabilities is design for all. 3 - Add communication redundancy. 4- Create a clear interaction language. download pdf at top for mor
Slide title: 1 co-create with your community and accessibility experts. there is an illustration of stick figures standing around a chalkboard working together.
This slide is an example slide that talks about how Microsoft excels at this concept by creating a tech lab for the community to come in and co-create with designers. There are multiple images of the lab. The image at the top shows a team ideating.
Slide title: 02 Design for permanent disabilities is design for all. on the right side there is a grey box with stick figures representing different people with situational, temporary and permanent disabilities.
Slide title: Example - The Oxo potato peeler was originally designed for those with arthritis. There is an image on the righ that shows a couple of early prototypes of the Oxo good grips product
Slide title: 03 Add communication redundancy. There are a couple of icons in the grey square on the right. The icons are a hand for touch, and eye for visibility, and ear for audio and a head speaking suggesting speech and voice inputs and outputs.
Slide title: 04 Create a clear interaction language. There are icons in the grey box to the right suggesting core design language considerations, like size, shape, legibility, textures, color and contrast, and sound.
Slide title: Example, Interaction language. There is a pictire on the right that shows an image of a Dyson vacuum cleaner that communicates touch-points clearly using large bold colored buttons.
Slide title: 05 Understand the users journey. There is an illustration on the ride side within the grey box, that shows a stick figure interviewing someone in a wheelchair, and an illustration above them that represents users journey.
Slide title: Example, Visualize a users journey - identify opportunities. There are 3 images on the right, image one is woman walking with her friend who is blind and using a cane to navigate, 2nd image is of a doctor pushing a woman in a wheelchair.
Slide title: 06 Assistive Tech, Balancing Function and Aesthetics. On the right within the grey box are illustrations highlighting different types of assistive tech like prosthetics, hearing aids, wheelchairs, speech to text and self stabilizing fork
Slide title: Example 1, Specialized assistive tech vs. mainstream assistive tech. There is an image on the right of a child with beige unattractive cochlear implants and a girl wearing modern white headphones.

I wanted to create an easy-to-understand set of guidelines that gave our designers and engineers tools and insights for making inclusive-driven design decisions.

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