WCAG 2.2 / Inclusive Design / 01
People before criteria
Understand disability, assistive technology, situational constraints, and the limits of conformance.
Before you begin
By the end, you can…
- Describe disability as an interaction with barriers
- Distinguish conformance from lived usability
- Include disabled people in evaluation
01 / Understand
Accessibility is a quality of the interaction
A person is not the edge case. Barriers emerge when a product assumes one way of seeing, hearing, moving, understanding, or communicating. The same barrier may affect permanent disability, a temporary injury, or someone using a phone in glare.
WCAG gives testable requirements and a shared baseline. Conformance is valuable, but it cannot guarantee that every person can use a product. Automated tools find only a subset of problems; human testing supplies context and strategies.
02 / Apply
Use standards and lived evidence together
Organize checks around perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Then test real tasks with keyboard, screen readers, zoom, voice input, and people whose access needs differ from yours.
Describe barriers precisely: the control has no accessible name; focus moves behind the dialog; the error is conveyed by color only. Precision makes repair possible.
03 / Make
Your studio task
Make — Interview or learn from one person whose access needs differ from yours.
- Choose one important task.
- List the sensory, motor, cognitive, and situational assumptions it makes.
- Test the task with two different access methods.
- Document barriers as observable cause and impact.
Your notes describe barriers and strategies without reducing the person to a persona stereotype.
04 / Check