Inclusive by Design — Accessibility in UX from Personas to Production

Too often, accessibility is treated as a compliance checkbox at the end of a project, when it's expensive to fix and easy to overlook. The most effective way to build inclusive products is to start at the very beginning — with the people you're designing for.

This session focuses on embedding accessibility into the core of UX and design practice. We'll begin with user personas: how to intentionally represent people with disabilities so their needs shape decisions, not afterthoughts. From there, we'll explore the "shift left" approach — integrating accessibility considerations early in ideation, wireframing, and design rather than catching them late in QA. We'll look at how to test with real users who have disabilities and why that matters more than automated checks alone. And we'll tackle one of the most common pitfalls in product design: making assumptions about what users need instead of asking them.

If you design, build, or influence digital products, this session will give you a framework for making inclusion a starting point, not a retrofit.