Inclusive Design Is Not a Compliance Exercise. It Is a Design Philosophy.

Published: 2023  |  Perspective updated: 2025

A couple of years ago I attended Accessibility Scotland — a conference dedicated to digital accessibility and inclusive design. I came away energised, which is not always how conferences leave you. What struck me was a recurring theme in the talks: the most powerful accessible design does not start with regulation. It starts with a genuine commitment to including everyone, and the recognition that lived experience is the only reliable guide to what that actually means.

That distinction — between designing to comply and designing to include — is one that matters enormously in financial services. And it is one the industry still does not always get right.

The compliance trap

There is a version of digital accessibility that treats it as a checklist. Meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Pass the audit. Tick the box. Move on.

That version of accessibility tends to produce services that are technically compliant and practically difficult to use for the people they are supposed to serve. Compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. And for the millions of people in the UK who navigate digital services with disabilities, impairments, or simply low digital confidence, a floor that just about meets the minimum standard is not enough.

Over 16 million people in the UK have a disability — nearly one in five of the population. The frustration of not being able to access a website or online service because an organisation has failed to consider your needs is not an abstract inconvenience. It is a form of discrimination. It limits access to essential services, employment, healthcare, and financial products.

Accessibility professionals now broadly recognise that the value of digital accessibility extends well beyond compliance — with the majority saying it improves user experience, customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and customer retention. The business case is clear. The question is whether organisations are willing to treat inclusive design as a strategic priority rather than a regulatory requirement.

What “beyond regulation” actually means in practice

The talks at Accessibility Scotland that stayed with me were the ones that pushed past the guidelines into the harder question of what it actually means to design for people rather than for standards.

Designing for real people means testing with real people — specifically with people who experience the barriers you are trying to remove. Accessibility must be embedded from the start, not retrofitted. From screen reader compatibility to cognitive-friendly layouts, inclusive design benefits everyone — and support must be personal and empathetic.

That last point is important. Accessible design is not just about assistive technology. It is about cognitive load. About clear language. About not assuming that the person using your service has the same level of familiarity with your product category that you do. In financial services, where the terminology alone can be a barrier, that matters enormously.

The businesses leading on accessibility are those embedding it into every stage of their design process — creating products that are not only compliant but genuinely enjoyable to use for the widest possible range of people. That is a different ambition from passing an audit. And it requires a different process — one that starts with understanding who is being excluded and why, before reaching for a solution.

The lived experience piece

The conference put significant emphasis on lived experience informing digital solutions — and this is where I think a lot of organisations underinvest.

It is possible to design a technically accessible product without ever speaking to a disabled person. It is possible to meet every WCAG criterion and still produce something that a screen reader user finds deeply frustrating to navigate, or that a person with cognitive difficulties cannot follow. The guidelines tell you what to achieve. They do not tell you whether you have actually achieved it in a way that works for real people.

Bringing lived experience into the design process is not a nice-to-have. It is the only way to close the gap between technical compliance and genuine usability. That means involving disabled people as research participants, as testers, and — ideally — as contributors to the design process itself, not just subjects of it.

The direction of travel in accessibility regulation is toward embedding accessibility as an ongoing process rather than a one-time compliance exercise. The organisations that are ahead of that shift are the ones treating accessibility as part of their core design culture — not something that happens at the end of a build, or only when an audit is due.

What this means for financial services

Financial services organisations have a particular responsibility here. They provide services that people cannot easily opt out of — pensions, insurance, bank accounts, mortgages. For many customers, there is no accessible alternative if the digital service does not work for them.

The shift toward digital-first has made this more urgent, not less. More than 10 million UK adults still lack basic digital skills, with older and disabled people disproportionately affected. Public services are increasingly digital by default, yet many users struggle to access them due to poor design, lack of support, or affordability barriers.

Consumer Duty, which now requires financial services firms to demonstrate genuine good outcomes for all customers, makes the case for inclusive design even more directly. A journey that is technically available but practically inaccessible to a significant proportion of your customer base is not delivering a good outcome for those customers. That is not a philosophical position. It is now a regulatory one.

The Accessibility Scotland conference reminded me that the organisations doing this well are not those with the most sophisticated assistive technology. They are the ones that have genuinely shifted their design culture — from building products and then making them accessible, to building accessibility into what good design means from the start.

That shift is available to any organisation willing to make it. It just requires treating inclusion as a design ambition, not a compliance deadline.