I’ve been attending a series of events for Digital Accessibility Week 2026, a cross-government online event taking place from Monday 18 May ending on Thursday 21 May which is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).
One of the events was Designing with autistic people – Inclusive design that benefits everyone, organised by HMRC’s digital accessibility team.
Delivered by Irina Rusakova, an Inclusive design and research consultant, it was a fascinating and powerful insight into how autistic and neurodivergent people are frequently let down by design that fails to meet their needs. I encourage you to read Irina’s published research including her 7 principles of designing for autistic people.
However, powerful as the session was, I want to focus on one small part, not strictly related to autism and neurodiversity.
Inclusion fuels innovation
As with many accessibility talks, we touched on the fallacy that inclusive design stifles innovation.
Irina demonstrated several examples showing how in fact the reverse is true, including electric toothbrushes, flexible straws and captions/subtitles – all technologies that were designed to include people with disabilities but which were then widely adopted by non-disabled people because they are just incredibly useful.
Irina asked those watching the webinar if they had used any of these technologies and invited comments in the meeting chat. There were over 200 people watching, and this elicited 65 replies.
Continue reading “Why people use subtitles and captioning”