Posted on by Henny Swan in Design and development, Standards
The Inclusive Design Principles (IDP) were first published in 2016 by myself, Ian Pouncey, Léonie Watson, and Heydon Pickering. We felt that while the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set out what to do to meet technical compliance, many design decisions fall outside the scope of WCAG but still determine whether an interface is inclusive, usable, and welcoming.
The principles were developed to plug that gap with people-centred guidance that helps teams make better design decisions without adding unnecessary complexity. In this post, we'll look at who the principles are for, what they can be applied to, how they help people, and how you can integrate them into your own practices.
Firstly let's look at each of the seven principles and what they are.
Ensure your interface provides a comparable experience for all so people can accomplish tasks in a way that suits their needs without undermining the quality of the content.
Providing a comparable experience is more than just adding alternatives for images, video, and audio. Those alternatives need to be high quality so that people who experience the web in different ways have content that is just as effective. After all, text descriptions, captions, audio description, and transcripts are not supplementary, they are primary content for many of us.
Inclusion goes further still: however someone consumes or navigates content, whether with assistive technology or an adaptive strategy, their experience should be just as usable and enjoyable as anyone else’s, not just technically accessible.
People use your interface in different situations. Make sure your interface delivers a valuable experience to people regardless of their circumstances.
Inclusive design isn’t just about the interface; it’s also about the context in which someone is using it. Accessibility and usability can be affected by a person’s environment, or by how they’re feeling mentally or physically.
A well-designed interface should work just as well for someone using it on a crowded train with limited signal, as it does for someone at home with full concentration. Designing with context in mind means recognising that people’s abilities and needs change - sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently — and ensuring your product adapts to meet them.
Use familiar conventions and apply them consistently.
Consistency is key. It helps people navigate with confidence, reduces cognitive load, and builds familiarity with your product. The goal is to balance innovation with familiar conventions and learned behaviours.
Internal consistency means using your organisation’s design system and adhering to shared patterns. This could include consistent keyboard behaviour across components, or language guidelines that shape how instructions, buttons, and links are written across your product.
External consistency means following established web conventions that people have come to expect such as search positioned high up in the content order in the top-right corner, or commonly used icons. These patterns reduce the need for people to relearn how things work.
Ensure people are in control. People should be able to access and interact with content in their preferred way.
Giving control means respecting how people choose to experience content, not forcing a one-size-fits-all approach. It ensures that people can adjust how content is displayed using their own assistive technologies, adaptive strategies, or preferences without being blocked by restrictive design decisions.
This shouldn't limit creativity or innovation, it simply means designing in ways that don’t override people's needs. For example, people should be able to pause or disable animations and videos, stop auto-advancing carousels, zoom without layout breaking, and adjust font sizes or colours to support readability.
Consider providing different ways for people to complete tasks, especially those that are complex or non-standard.
Not to be confused with “give control,” offering choice is about providing multiple ways for people to complete the same tasks, especially when those tasks are complex, unfamiliar, or require specific interactions.
This might mean allowing people to drag and drop or use standard form fields, complete a form online or download it to fill out offline, or access support through a live chat or a help article.
Help users focus on core tasks, features, and information by prioritising them within the content and layout.
Prioritising content is often overlooked in design, but when done well, it has a huge positive impact on accessibility and inclusion.
By putting the most important tasks, features, and information high up in the content order, you reduce cognitive load and help people complete what they came to do, faster and with less frustration. This is especially important for non-mouse users and people with limited time, lower literacy, or attention-related disabilities.
Good content prioritisation is more than just a thoughtful content order however, it’s also about making information easy to scan, read, and act on. This includes using keywords at the start of headings and link text, writing clear copy that puts the main point first, and removing anything that distracts or overwhelms.
Consider the value of features and how they improve the experience for different users.
There is a big crossover between adding value and innovation, but innovation isn’t valuable if it creates barriers or complexity.
Adding value means introducing features or enhancements that genuinely support accessibility and inclusion. This might mean adding features that facilitate task completion such as a show password toggle, voice input options in search and forms, or customisable notification settings.
The principles can be applied to any type of interface including, but not limited to:
You can also apply them when mapping out:
Simply put, they are for everyone involved in the design, development, and delivery of digital products and services. This includes:
The principles help people designing and building interfaces as well as disabled people using interfaces.
The principles can support product teams in several ways, by:
The Inclusive Design Principles help people using products by:
The Inclusive Design Principles can be applied throughout the product development lifecycle, from early research through to delivery and quality assurance.
The principles can be used to shape inclusive thinking from the start.
The principles can be used to help inform research questions. For example:
Is this a comparable experience for someone using a screen reader or voice input?
or
How can we offer people a choice of more than one way to complete this task?
This ensures your research considers different perspectives from the start.
The principles can act as a reference for requirements. For example, if you’re designing a dashboard with live updates, the requirement might be:
Ensure people can control when the dashboard is updated.
This helps people with thinking or seeing disabilities who want to avoid unexpected dashboard changes, for example by adding pause, refresh, or update frequency controls.
Ensure people have a choice as to what content appears on the dashboard
This helps people with seeing, moving, and thinking disabilities reduce distractions and unwanted content by allowing personalisation and customisation.
Review layouts, interaction patterns, alternatives, and language against the principles. For example, on a charity website this could mean prioritising the donate and get support buttons in the content order and making them visually prominent.
Or it could mean adding value to a search input by including voice input to support people who struggle to input text using a keyboard or spell words correctly.
Capture decisions and feedback in design annotations to clarify intent for developers and QA. This reduces ambiguity, builds understanding, and prevents accessibility from being dropped during handoff, and supports more consistent, inclusive outcomes across teams (Be consistent).
The principles can help guide coding decisions when you’re unsure of the best way to implement a feature or component.
For example, if you have two working prototypes, asking how well each one aligns with the Inclusive Design Principles can help reveal which option provides a more inclusive, user-centred experience. Even if both are technically functional, one may better support diverse needs and offer a more comparable experience.
When paired with WCAG, the principles help ensure interfaces go beyond compliance, creating more thoughtful and inclusive experiences.
WCAG sets essential requirements but cannot fully address design, which is often subjective. The IDP help bridge this gap by showing what good design looks like in the context of your product and the different situations in which people use it.
The principles can help teams evaluate user experience when usability testing with disabled people isn’t possible through:
Since their release, the IDP have been referenced in design systems, adopted in accessibility programmes, and used as teaching tools in training and education.
We use them every day, and feature in a number of our services such:
As a consultancy, we design services and solutions that help our customers meet complex challenges. The Inclusive Design Principles shape not only the guidance we give on products and features, but also the strategies and processes that ensure accessibility and inclusion are built into every stage of delivery.
They are also currently used by many organisations all over the world including:
The principles don’t replace WCAG or other standards; they provide a lens for good design that includes everyone. Used consistently, they help shift accessibility from compliance to culture.
For more information about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, read our WCAG primer or find out more about how our assessments can help you identify issues in your websites, mobile applications, design systems, and other products and services.
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