Summary: Designing for accessibility and inclusivity has become central to design conversations. However, disability advocacy within this context often gets reduced to technical compliance or an abstract commitment to inclusivity. To genuinely improve accessibility, it is crucial to center the lived experience of people with disabilities. At the same time recognize that advocacy for people with disabilities is distinct from general user advocacy. Additionally, framing accessibility as ‘inclusive design’ ignores other identity-related barriers, such as those tied to race, gender, or socioeconomic status.

Understanding Disability Advocacy in UX

Disability advocacy in UX involves more than checking boxes for legal accessibility requirements like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). It prioritizes the lived experiences of individuals with disabilities, acknowledging the unique challenges they face. These perspectives go beyond usability testing—they inform every stage of the design process, from research to implementation.

Lived experience in disability refers to the firsthand knowledge and insights of disabled people about navigating barriers in daily life. It highlights personal perspectives on accessibility, inclusion, and systemic challenges that may be overlooked by non-disabled advocates or policymakers.

Lived experience is typically discovered through codesign or ethnographic studies of people with disabilities. It provides you with deep context insights that traditional approaches often cannot capture. For instance, designing a navigation system with a screen reader user in mind requires understanding not just how assistive technologies work but also how people use them in real-life contexts—often juggling inconsistent device support, outdated software, or poorly implemented features.

Bottom line: Lived experience is that thing you don’t have as a designer or researcher, and generative AI is never going to have it. To be a better advocate you need to bring in the lived experience of people with disabilities.

Check out this case study on Service Design and Autism services

Why You Need Lived Experience-led Advocacy

First let’s focus on what doesn’t help: Generative AI or “Disability Simulations”

• Generative AI can never have lived experience. It can, however, ‘fake it,’ and it’s a good starting point. It’s even a terrific synthetic SME (Subject Matter Expert) but never a suitable user replacement. This is especially true of understanding an access issue for a customer with a disability. Advances in automating accessibility checking with AI, on the other hand, are welcome. But again, their flaw is in being regulation compliant, not focusing on the quality of accessibility experience.
• Disability simulators are when you fake it like you have a disability in a workshop, for research or to induce empathy. You end up with deliberately faked empathy, which is far worse than nonintentional clumsy fake empathy of the Design Thinking variety.

The recent story of Barclay’s bank agency offering mystery shoppers to pretend to be blind or deaf to assess accessibility is a case in point. How can you understand actual barriers to a service if you’re having mystery shoppers pretend to be deaf or blind?

Next, let’s see where a lived experience framework (PDF) can play a role in how you do accessibility using a disability advocacy approach.

Separating Disability Advocacy from General User Advocacy

While user advocacy ensures that the needs of a broad audience are met, disability advocacy targets specific barriers faced by people with disabilities. These barriers often go unnoticed in traditional user research and personas unless explicitly prioritized.

See How to Create Inclusive Personas…

For example:

• General user advocacy may emphasize creating a simple and intuitive interface.
• Disability advocacy ensures that this simplicity extends to screen reader-friendly layouts, keyboard navigation, and strategic use of alternative text (ALT) descriptions. It factors in for the context of a screen reader’s experience reflecting common challenges blind or low vision users face.

The key difference is that disability advocacy doesn’t assume that designing for the “average user” will meet the needs of everyone. By separating disability advocacy from general user advocacy, we can address specific, systemic barriers while still supporting broader usability goals.

See You need 3 kinds of user advocacy

Inclusive Design: A Broader Perspective

Inclusive design aims to create products and services that work for as many people as possible, regardless of ability, background, or context. While disability is a significant aspect of inclusivity, it is not the only dimension. Restricting the term “inclusive design” to disability-related concerns risks erasing other identity-based barriers, such as:

• Gender: Are forms designed to accommodate non-binary gender identities?
• Race: Are color palettes and visuals free from biases that exclude or misrepresent certain groups?
• Language: Are interfaces accessible to non-native speakers or people with low literacy?

For truly inclusive design, accessibility must intersect with these broader considerations. For instance, designing for a blind, non-English-speaking user might require both screen reader support and a multilingual interface—a scenario that bridges disability advocacy and other forms of user inclusion.

The Role of Lived Experience

To do disability advocacy, you need to understand lived experience. Lived experience is invaluable for understanding the nuances of accessibility. However, it must be integrated thoughtfully into the design process. Employing individuals with disabilities in UX teams or advisory roles ensures that accessibility is not an afterthought but a core part of product development.

For example:

• Co-design sessions with disabled participants can uncover overlooked pain points.
• Accessibility testing led by people with disabilities often highlights practical issues that automated tools miss.

Practical Steps for Disability Advocacy in UX

1. Engage directly with the disability community: Build relationships with advocacy groups, conduct interviews, and involve disabled users in research and testing.
2. Hire for lived experience: Include people with disabilities in design, development, and decision-making roles. Aim for 35-45% of your project team or board to be people with disabilities (Government of Canada).
3. Do Ethnography and User Testing: The key is to do early-on research to gain lived experience. It’s important to test with users with disabilities as well.
4. Test continuously: Accessibility testing should be an ongoing process, not a final-stage checkbox. This includes more testing during QA where the details matter.
5. Educate Teams: Train designers and developers on both technical standards and the lived realities of accessibility. Hint: Bring my Accessibility Training in-house, or get an older version of it as part of your Interaction Design Foundation membership.
6. Measure Impact: Use qualitative and quantitative metrics to assess how accessibility improvements affect users.

Call to Action:

Disability advocacy and inclusive design must work together to create equitable experiences. However, they should not be conflated. Disability advocacy focuses on removing specific barriers, while inclusive design considers the broader spectrum of identity-based challenges. Recognizing this distinction allows for more targeted, effective solutions.

By centering lived experience and acknowledging intersectionality, UX professionals can improve their disability advocacy leading to better accessibility design. Accessibility is not a “nice-to-have”—it is a fundamental aspect of ethical, effective design. The challenge is to approach it with the nuance, empathy, and rigor it demands.

Learn more: Frank teaches monthly at UX Inner Circle.com (FREE from the day you start Masterclasses, Miniclasses, Drop-In, Book Club…) For access to the Digital Library with 275 assets, 1:1 mentoring, workshops and more join starting at USD $49 a month (financial inclusiveness pricing) or $99 standard. 20% discount on annual membership.