The Road Ahead: The New Accessibility Landscape
Explore the future of digital accessibility, driven by the rise of AI and voice, shaped by new legislation, and championed by the design systems community.
In parts one and two of this accessibility series, I shared a framework for creating a business case that will secure sponsorship, as well as how to dodge the "built-in" accessibility trap in Design Systems. Now, let's take a look at how various factors are shaping the future in this domain, including the rise of generative AI, the shift to voice-first interfaces, the impact of post-legislation effects, and the community driving it forward.
The future of accessibility isn't just about compliance; it's about creating truly intelligent experiences that can adapt to user needs faster than ever before. Blurring the lines between what is a legal “must have” for people with disabilities, and native capabilities that we will all start using more frequently.
The Technology Catalyst: AI and Voice Redefining Interaction
It truly is a fascinating time to leverage tech to cater to the uniqueness of being human. We are every day closer to interacting with user interfaces that are created in real-time, allowing them to detect our specific interests and needs. This enables us to complete tasks and solve problems faster than ever before.
The effort needed to deliver digital experiences that anyone can access, regardless of their abilities, is also decreasing. AI can now be leveraged to auto-generate alt text for images, suggest color palette adjustments for better contrast, and even write more accessible microcopy. Making room for us tech folks to explore innovative ways in which we interact with digital products.
Up until now, our interactions with LLMs have been mostly chat-based. However, we are moving closer to a world in which using our voice and natural speech will become more relevant in our interactions with digital services. A concept that, until now, has been limited to screen readers and biased “smart” assistants that struggle to respond to a variety of user inputs, including synonyms, colloquialisms, pronunciation, and natural variations in speech across languages. I can’t tell you how often I currently find myself deepening my voice to mimic a male timbre when I speak to my Google Home, so that it understands what I’m asking, and it's incredibly frustrating when it responds to me in Spanish, even though I’m interacting with it in English (yes, true story, and yes, it's rude!). But those days are soon to be over with the advent of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs).
Imagine being able to accurately book hotels and flights with just a simple voice request to your device without having to touch the screen. Doing grocery shopping and selecting a delivery timeframe in a matter of minutes without having to fill out dozens of input fields. Being naturally and seamlessly guided through a checkout flow that adapts to your own particularities and asks you for the minimal and precise input the service needs from you in order to produce valuable outcomes.
The more we demand that voice user interfaces improve, the more we will be able to empathize with the reality of many people who are visually or motor-impaired today.
The opportunity for Design Systems: Patterns
Things are about to get interesting in this field, too. Will we have to start thinking about how to componentize voice commands? Probably. However, as it has recently begun to be discussed in the design systems community, the future lies in patterns, more specifically, in how these help define how services communicate, understand, and interact with humans.
To capture your users' attention, your brand becomes the voice, and your design system the infrastructure to ensure the delivery of a coherent experience that is aligned with your values across devices. Your system will also be responsible for abstracting conversational flows that are more similar to how humans actually speak. And, we will also need to ensure that it can handle errors properly in case of mumbling or mispronunciation, just like humans do. Your system will help define, preserve, and amplify the interface’s personality.
The Legal Tailwind: Life After the European Accessibility Act (EAA)
The European Accessibility Act's deadline, which makes accessibility a legal requirement for a wide range of digital products and services in the European Union, passed on June 28th, earlier this year. In preparation for it, many organizations shifted the conversation around accessibility from "should we?" to "how do we?". In fact, there's a noticeable increase in demand for accessibility specialists and tools, and these companies have correctly started to identify their Design System as critical infrastructure to achieve compliance at scale.
However, a few businesses are seeking exceptions in the legislation to avoid being subject to the EAA. Others have failed to implement the required measures before the deadline. Notably, the first publicly reported action by a coalition of French disability advocacy and legal organizations issued formal legal notices to four of the country's largest grocery retailers: Auchan, Carrefour, E. Leclerc, and Picard.
The legal action was explicitly based on France's national implementation of the European Accessibility Act. The advocacy groups issued a clear ultimatum: the four retailers were given until September 1, 2025, to bring their online grocery services into full compliance with the regulations. Failure to meet this deadline would result in the initiation of formal legal proceedings in court.
As legal pressures increase, the design systems community isn't just watching from the sidelines; it's actively responding.
The response from the design systems community
A couple of weeks ago, I attended another session of the Into Design Systems chapter in Berlin, in which design systems practitioners from companies such as Babbel and Zalando shared their knowledge and advancements to ensure their users have access to more inclusive experiences including detailed recommendations from their frontend implementation, as well as the positive business impact that implementing accessibility practices has brought, raising the bar for what is expected from folks in product development.
Meetups like these are vital. They transform abstract challenges into shared, solvable problems and foster a collective sense of responsibility, pushing the accessibility and design systems space forward faster than siloed attempts could do alone.
Building Tomorrow's Inclusive Experiences, Today
The future of accessibility is a powerful combination of legal mandates (the push), technological innovation (the pull), and community collaboration (the momentum).
Instead of standing still and waiting for the next tech wave, my invitation is to start experimenting and playing around with AI tools that allow you to reproduce the VUI experience and create prototypes that use voice as their main input source for your existing apps. And join the local (and worldwide) communities that care about inclusivity in the digital world.
This is our responsibility as digital experience creators, so that we can help shape the next wave of tech in interaction design, one that is natively inclusive.