Big Motive came in to give us our brief for Design Week in April:
“Make other designers care about adhering to accessibility standards in their work.”
We were split into groups and assigned different topics from the Understanding Accessibility website. My group focused on Media, so we began by listing all the different types—images, video, audio, text, graphics, animations, etc.—and discussing the many ways each one can become inaccessible online. This sparked a bigger conversation about why accessibility often gets overlooked in digital design, especially when similar barriers wouldn’t be acceptable in real life.
That idea became the core of our concept: if inaccessibility wouldn’t pass in the physical world, why should it pass on the web? From there, we explored how we could bring inaccessible media into a real-life setting to make that disconnect more obvious.
Our group developed an idea for an “inaccessible media gallery”—a physical exhibition that showcases common accessibility failures in a tangible, confrontational way. For example:
The aim is to make designers feel the frustration, confusion, and exclusion that inaccessible media creates—something people often overlook when everything stays behind a screen.
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A few weeks later we met with the team from Big Motive again to present the ideas we’ve been developing for Design Week. My group shared our “art gallery of inaccessible media” concept, which uses physical installations to highlight how often digital accessibility issues would be unacceptable in real-world contexts. The feedback we received was really helpful and gave us clearer direction on how to strengthen the idea.
One of the key points was to bring the human problem to the forefront. Rather than focusing on the technical side of accessibility, the team encouraged us to anchor the concept in real user impact, why inaccessibility matters and who is affected. They also mentioned that we don’t need to explicitly reference WCAG and it’s more important to communicate the principles of accessibility in a way that’s understandable and engaging. Another piece of feedback was to explore the sensory aspect more deeply, especially how experiences like sensory overload could be represented within our gallery concept.
Slide Deck made by Noah Weston
Slide Deck made by Noah Weston