Designing for the 20% with Claire Dellar

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Key Discussion Topics & Highlights

♿ Accessibility & Inclusive Design

• Accessibility means achieving the same task with the same effort, regardless of impairment.
• It’s not just for people with disabilities—includes anyone with temporary or situational challenges.
• Good accessibility benefits everyone (e.g. the curb cut effect).
• Designing for the 20% (those with access needs) automatically benefits the remaining 80%.
• Examples of thoughtful app design: NHS app’s large, spaced-out buttons and strong contrast.

🌍 Barriers to Access

• Challenges include lack of internet, poor UI design, small buttons, and unclear navigation.
• PDFs, ads, or cluttered pages disrupt screen reader flow and focus.
• Screen readers and assistive tools like Dragon Naturally Speaking must be properly supported.
• System logic and structure (e.g. correct reading order) must be optimised for accessibility.
• Dependence is often viewed negatively in society, though it can foster deeper connection.

🧠 Lived Experience & Empathy

• Claire’s experiences as a neurodiverse, wheelchair-using woman inform her design advocacy.
• Dependence on others creates deeper, more meaningful friendships and insights.
• Vulnerability is key to both leadership and friendship.
• Society’s focus on independence undervalues interdependence.
• Experiencing exclusion increases empathy and desire to challenge norms.

📣 Representation & Social Change

• Systems are historically built for white, straight, middle-class, cisgendered men.
• True inclusion requires changing narratives and increasing visibility.
• Lack of representation in media and education contributes to societal erasure.
• Storytelling fosters empathy—critical for cultural and systemic change.
• Design and culture must reflect the rich tapestry of society.

💡 Good Practice & Guidelines

• GOV.UK and NHS digital service manuals are excellent examples of accessible design.
• These provide reusable components and follow WCAG 2.2 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
• WCAG levels:
  • Single A: Basic accessibility
  • AA: Recommended standard for most organisations
  • AAA: Advanced, used by organisations serving specific high-need groups

🚀 Advice for Innovators

• Engage with people different from yourself early in the design process.
• Do user research with the 20%, not just the easy-to-reach 80%.
• Use gov.uk and NHS manuals as a base—don’t reinvent the wheel.
• Be prepared for accessibility work to transform not just your product—but you.

Episode 3 Transcript

Hannah Clemmens (HC): Hello and welcome to the Digital Health Hubcast where technology and healthcare collide. I'm your host, Hannah Clemmens from the South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub, where we're on a mission to tackle health inequalities by transforming the future of digital health. Digital innovation is at the heart of the future of healthcare and on this podcast, I sit down with leading experts and innovators from across the digital health landscape to discuss the biggest opportunities, toughest challenges, and how we can innovate in this space to create a healthier and more connected future.

In this episode, we're talking about why accessibility is the key to digital health. In the UK, there are 16.1 million people living with a disability, equating to almost a quarter of the population. Given the shift towards digital over analogue, it's essential that emerging digital technologies are accessible to people with a variety of needs. A 2021 analysis showed that 97% of website home pages had detectable accessibility errors, so it's clear there's a lot of work to do here to make digital tech accessible to all users.

Speaking on this is Claire Dellar, a pioneering leader in digital health accessibility with over 22 years of experience in IT transformation. As an accessibility and inclusive design strategist working with the health service, Claire champions inclusive design in healthcare from cancer screening to electronic patient records. Driven by her experiences as a wheelchair user and a neurodiverse female leader, Claire campaigns for inclusive working practices and culture, both in the NHS and through her own business, Wheelchair Tango Foxtrot Consulting.

HC: Claire, thanks so much for being here. How are you doing today?

Claire Dellar (CD): It's absolutely a delight to be here. Thank you so much. And that was a lovely introduction.

HC: Ohh, thanks very much. It's such a pleasure to see you. So we're here today talking about accessibility. In your work, Claire, you aim to make digital health technologies accessible to all. Can you tell us a bit more about what that means?

CD: So accessibility means that someone who has an access need or an impairment can use a system or can achieve a goal in roughly the same amount of time as anybody else would, with roughly the same amount of effort. So you notice I've not used the word disability there. I'm talking about anybody with an impairment—that could be somebody who's pushing a pram, somebody who has had a bad night's sleep and therefore is not concentrating very well, or someone like me who's neurodiverse and a wheelchair user. So accessibility is about levelling that playing field so that we can each achieve what we need to, even if we do it in different ways.

HC: So it's all about making things as easy as they could be for anyone.

CD: Absolutely, including as many people as possible. Accessibility is a key part of inclusion. It's not the whole of it, of course, because inclusion is about ensuring that everybody is reflected in a system as well as served by that system, as well as actually being able to access things. We often talk about the Web Accessibility Content Guidelines, which are the rules—the Bible for people like myself who work in health technology and all technology—about how people can access systems. And we talk about whether it's perceivable—can they take in the information from it? Is it usable—can they navigate through it? And is it comprehensible—can they actually understand it? But any system, any product, whether it's physical, digital, whether it's a community thing or something that's built by a massive multinational company—if you follow those three principles, then things will be accessible and inclusive.

HC: Tell me more about what that looks like in an app, for example.

CD: So take for example an app which might have a number of buttons—the NHS app. Most of us have used that. The NHS app has a home page with the commonly used buttons that you are particularly likely to use. So that's the first thing—they've made it usable by putting the commonly used sections right up front. They've also spaced them out on the page and made them really easy to hit, so you're not trying to hit a really tiny little button. You're trying to tap a very big button and it's really obvious when you've pressed it because it turns bright yellow. So those are the kinds of things that would enable somebody to be able to look at that, manipulate it, interact with it, and also, you hope, understand it because it's well spaced out. So it's not too crowded. The colour contrast—you've made sure that it's going to be easily perceived by people. It's not too bright a background because that can be overwhelming for people like myself who are neurodiverse, but it still stands out well for people who have a visual impairment.

And of course, companies all over the world use content designers to ensure not only is it technically accessible—in that you can click things and you can interact with things, you can use assistive technology with it like a screen reader or voice recognition—but also that everything that's written in it is understandable. So instead of saying ‘Click Here’, putting a link that actually describes where the link goes—that's a form of content accessibility. So saying ‘The Wheelchair Tango Foxtrot blog’ instead of a ‘click here’. Then if somebody comes along and they're using a screen reader, the screen reader reads it out, tells the person that it's a link, and they know exactly where it's going.

HC: All of those things, Claire, sound like they would make these apps better for everyone, regardless of additional need.

CD: Absolutely. So I often talk about designing for the 20%. Designing for the 20% turns the 80/20 rule on its head. So we've all heard of the 80/20 rule. The 80% of the population roughly who are non-disabled, things are often designed with them in mind, and then the design is tweaked to try to make it usable for as many of the 20% as possible. But if you actually designed for the 20% first, the 80% are already sorted.

HC: They're already fine.

CD: Yeah, it's called the curb cut effect. So I don't know if you've ever tried to pull a suitcase up the edge of the pavement and cursed that there wasn't a drop curb or a curb cut. Yeah. That's the curb cut effect. They were originally invented for people like myself who use wheelchairs. But pushing a pram, carrying heavy luggage, not paying attention because you're walking looking at your mobile phone—whatever it might be—that curb cut actually helps a lot more people than just the ones originally intended. And the 80% can use the stuff that the 20% can use—not always the other way around. So start with the most difficult case in mind. Start with the people who have significant barriers to overcome in order to access your service. Everybody else will be sorted.

HC: I'm wondering perhaps if you can share some key barriers that people with disabilities might face when accessing digital healthcare or digital tools or services.

CD: Sure. So let's start with just actually being able to access it in the first place. So if we widen it beyond people with disabilities—anybody who faces some form of barrier to accessing our services. This is true inclusion. So for example, people who don't have internet access—it might be a choice, it might be an economic issue, it might be that they don't live in an area that's well served by the internet. But being able to access those services in the first place is the first barrier they've got to be able to overcome, and that's where we consider things like digitally assisted routes as you might call them, which is where you might call a call centre and they effectively use the system for you, asking you what your answer is to each of the questions. Maybe it's to register something or to pay the congestion charge or whatever it might be. Or you make versions which can work offline and it waits until it has an internet signal and then sends the data. So that's the start of inclusion.

Then you've got to think about how does it look? Is it going to be usable for somebody with a visual impairment? And remember, there are multiple different types of visual impairment. Everybody is different. What somebody with macular degeneration would see is totally different to what somebody with cataracts would. So looking at it through different lenses—pardon the pun—you've got to think about how easy is it to use? Is it easy to identify the button that I need to click? Is it in a logical position? I use a wheelchair taxi firm and they have an app and every time I go on the app to set the time of when I want to be picked up, I move the clock to the right location—which of course is not fully accessible because not everybody can hold something and move it on a screen—but I move the clock to where I want it to be and then I always hit the cancel button because the cancel button has been put on the far right closest to my thumb. And of course, the majority of people are right-handed and they're most likely to therefore hit something with their right thumb when they're using a mobile phone. And that button doesn't look any different colour-wise or shape-wise to the OK button. It's called having a clear call to action. So you're clear on each page what is the most likely action somebody is going to take and you make that one the obvious one and the easiest to click.

In other circumstances, you might need to think about things like your colour choices. Are they going to stand out for people? Are they going to be overwhelming? I get annoyed with a lot of apps that put multi-coloured backgrounds or patterned backgrounds or photographs behind text. Because I, as a dyslexic person, can't pick the text out from the busy image behind it. There are ways around that. You put a box around the text, or you fade the image out to virtually matte.

So I am a volunteer helping to run our accessibility lab, and one of the great things about accessibility labs is many of them contain gloves that make it feel like you've got arthritis. In fact, a lot of people comment that on my wheelchair instead of having a joystick—because I have an electric wheelchair—I have a golf ball. And that's because my fingers don't work very well, so I'm likely to hit the wrong button if they're too close together. Have you ever played games on your phone?

HC: Sure.

CD: And they get those annoying adverts up every five minutes.

HC: Ah, with the tiny little cross that you can't find. Yes, yes.

CD: And they deliberately do that so they've got the tiniest possible touch area so that you accidentally hit the button with the background that takes you to the advert rather than closing it. That's the kind of thing that really irritates me because my fingers don't work very well, so it can take me five or six goes to close one of those adverts. And so thinking about the layout on the screen—are things too close together? Are the buttons big enough?

And then there are assistive technologies that people use. So I use a screen reader and I use voice recognition. I use something called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. And that means that any system I use needs to be able to take in that information, so it's not coming from my keyboard, it's coming from a different programme. And I sometimes come up against applications and websites and tools that won't accept dictation, and it can end up with some very time-consuming, irritating barriers, like dictating text into something else and then copying it and pasting it into a system. And that's really, really frustrating.

The other thing that drives me mad is with my screen reader, when people haven't thought about the layout and what order things are going to be read out in. And often you actually in the background need to define what that order is so that the screen reader knows what to read. And also define things correctly so it knows what a button is and it knows when it's got to a hyperlink and it knows when it's got a free text field, for instance, so it can tell the user and it can interact correctly with it. So there's quite a lot to think about.

HC: Yeah. Yeah, so I can see how frustrating that might be if you're right there. You know, you're trying to understand this page and all you get is gobbledygook.

CD: Absolutely. Reading PDFs for instance, my screen reader will be halfway through a sentence, but it runs onto the next page and instead of running onto the next page and reading the rest of the sentence, it reads out the footer. So I might get things like, "Accessibility is a term used in the... page 5."

HC: That doesn't make any sense.

CD: No, it breaks concentration. It makes it really difficult to follow.

HC: I would disengage from that in 10 seconds.

CD: Yeah, I once had a document that had line numbers on it because I had to comment. It was an 80-page document. It was the British Standard for benefits management, and I was one of the authors. They originally sent me a PDF, but it had line numbers on because they wanted me to comment line by line. And the PDF literally was read out with the line number, so it would be, "Benefits management is... 615... the discipline of using tools to monitor... sixteen?"

HC: Yeah, that gets old pretty quickly.

CD: Very.

HC: I’d love to talk more about you, Claire. So you're a wheelchair user, you're a neurodiverse woman—tell me more about what life is like for you.

CD: OK. So I guess life is great and life is frustrating. When I first found out that I was going to need a wheelchair, I cried my eyes out. I had finally accepted that my condition meant that I was going to need to use something else to get around, and what I didn't realise was that actually it would give me my life back. People think that relying on a wheelchair or a mobility aid or screen reader is a weakness. Actually, it's a strength—to have the courage to pick it up and move anyway.

My conditions limit my energy. I have to be very careful about how much I do and what kinds of activities I do. And so being able to focus on the things I love, like working in accessibility and spending time with my friends and my family and going out and enjoying myself and going to the theatre and going to festivals—rather than spending the energy on walking—that's what my wheelchair gives me.

As a neurodiverse woman, it's also been quite difficult in the workplace, particularly early on. You know, I'm older than I look. I've had 22 years plus in the industry and at the beginning, neurodiversity was seen as a weakness and it was seen as something to be overcome or something that would hold you back. Whereas actually, neurodiversity, I believe, is the source of one of my strengths. As a dyslexic person, we often have the ability to see the world in a very interconnected way. I look at incredibly complex systems—the health system, a system for screening cancer, a system for engineering new technologies in health and care—and I see every connection. I see all the places where it's not functioning well, and I see how if you just unknotted one of those, it would push the problem further down the line. You actually have to take a systemic approach to understanding the issues and be strategic about which ones you unpick and in what order. That, I believe, comes from my neurodiversity.

It also makes me an incredibly spiritual person. I feel a very deep connection with the people who I care for. Having that understanding of how anything I do affects everybody around me comes with incredible responsibility, but also amazing opportunities. I do work that changes lives. I do work that saves lives. I'm not on the front line, but I get to impact the lives of potentially millions of people. And that's an incredibly special thing to do. It gives me a real purpose in life and a reason to get up in the morning—which, given how sick I feel first thing in the morning, it's helpful to have a reason to get out.

It's also been hugely important in my personal life. It's formed my identity. I've always had a very strong sense of injustice and wanting to fight for what is right. And experiencing it has given me greater insight. We're recording this in Black History Month and I've been involved in panel sessions with colleagues and friends who are Black, Asian, or from a minority ethnic background, and I felt incredibly welcomed by them as a white ally, but also as somebody who—as a person who is both disabled and in an inter-abled relationship, but also in an interracial relationship—while my experience is never ever going to equate to the experience of my partner who's Black, there are similarities that give me an empathy with what he's experiencing.

And it's fascinating sometimes—and upsetting—to see how people react to the two of us. The number of people who assume he's my carer, for example. The number of people who stare at us when we're wheeling/walking through town holding hands. I've been called a race traitor. I've been asked whether he's my carer. I've been asked, "What's it like to have sex?" I'm like, you're a complete stranger in a coffee shop—why am I going to tell you that?

But it has given me an insight into what people experience, and so it's given me a passion for what I do and it's why I founded my consultancy.

HC: How do you cope with that? I mean, any person coming up to anyone else in a coffee shop to ask about your relationship—that seems nuts. How do you cope with things like that, with people behaving in the ways that you've described?

CD: I suppose there's the "I can't believe they just said that," which I tend to deal with maybe a bit of wit or humour, depending on the circumstances. And then there's the scary ones. There's the people who yell at me out of car windows. I've had some pretty unpleasant things yelled at me by people driving by. The first time it happened I shouted back. And then I thought, I just put myself at risk there. And so I've learned not to do that.

And yes, it can put quite a strain on your psyche to constantly be facing this. We live in a society where ableism permeates every single element of it. We grow up with it. We bloom into an ableist environment. We are given a mould, rules, and a culture that values strength and sees independence as strength. And so to be dependent in certain ways on other people is seen as a weakness.

If I were a person who maybe had children and I depended on my parents for some childcare—that is accepted by society. But the fact that I depend on my parents to sometimes drive me places because driving takes energy that I don't have—is seen as a weakness. So, society has made a value judgement as to what form of dependency is actually acceptable and what is seen as a weakness.

I think the people who yell at me out of car windows, and the people who ask the really weird questions—they're acting from a place of fear. They are afraid that at some point in their life they may become disabled through no choice or fault of their own. It happens to many of us. And they look at my life and they fear it—instead of seeing the beauty and the joy in it.

So what I really want is for us to see dependence and to see disability and to see difference as something beautiful and something that connects us. I have incredibly close friendships now because I depend somewhat on my friends. And I worry that I don't give enough back. But what I give is friendship. I give them support, and therefore I am the person they come to, to talk to when they're upset. Those are all things that I can still do. And they don't feel very valuable to me, but to them, they're incredibly valuable. Just as the ten minutes that it takes for them to put away my garden furniture at the end of the summer doesn't feel like much to them, but it seems like a mountain to me because there's no way I can do it. And so we have developed some incredibly close friendships that are going to last the rest of our lives.

HC: Do you think that level of dependency, the word you used, with your friends. Do you think that's enabled like a deeper level of connection?

CD: Definitely. It's a deeper level of understanding. In the workplace, I often talk about vulnerability as being the key to leadership. And I think it's also the key to friendship. If you're not vulnerable with people, if you don't show them your inner self, who are they being friends with? They're being friends with the superficial version of you, whereas my friends have seen me at my worst. My friends have picked me up off the floor and called 999. They've packed hospital bags for me. They've taken in my laundry. They've cooked meals for me when I've not been able to or I've called them to come round and give me a hand packing and to come up here today. And that gives us a deeper level where we don't even have to speak, we just have to be around each other for it to feel wonderful. Because we know each other so well. It's such a deep connection that we have. So there is a beauty in dependence and interdependence, and I believe everybody has value. And everybody is able to give back in some way, even if it's just the joy of service.

HC: That's wonderful.

CD: Maybe I should go sit on a mountain top and spout epherisms.

HC: Sounds like you already halfway there.

CD: I think the orange robe would probably clash with my pink hair.

HC: OK, here's a question. Is there anything, Claire, that you really wish able-bodied people wouldn't do or would stop doing immediately? Other than asking really personal questions in coffee shops?

CD: That would be a great one. And stop parking across drop curbs because I can't just go round and step off the pavement to go around them. So that really does annoy me. What would I like everybody to do? I would like them to be a little more aware of the way their behaviour and our preferences affect other people. Why do we have steps into buildings? We've done it historically for years, for decades, for hundreds of years, thousands of years, the step has been the way to move up a steep slope in a relatively short distance. And so the ramp is often the second thought and it's round the back. Or you've gotta drive round in circles to find it, or it's nowhere near the disabled parking space. And so actually taking that attitude of designing for the 20% and therefore the 80% will already be served is the attitude I would like people to adopt—thinking about how we build our homes, how we create technology, how we operate as a society, who we value. Creating spaces that are inclusive but feel welcoming, not just for people like me who have a wheelchair but also people who are neurodiverse, people who come from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background, women feeling safe in an environment, trans people feeling safe in their environment. Feeling seen. Feeling understood.

Black History Month—the month that we're recording in—the theme is reclaiming the narrative. We don't tell enough stories. Stories are how we understand the environment and the people around us, and we need to hear the stories of many people. Because with storytelling, we attach our emotions rather than our heads. And that gives us empathy, and that makes us more thoughtful. I think it also removes some of that fear. So if people had more empathy for people like me and more understanding of people like me, they would be less fearful. We would have fewer mental health problems. We would be happier.

HC: So you're saying it's more about stepping outside of your own experience?

CD: Very definitely. And this is where coming and observing how I get around the building or coming and having a chat with me about what it's like to be at a conference, for instance, when you're a wheelchair user and you're neurodiverse and you're being overwhelmed by all the sound. Or observing someone in a natural environment.

In health technology, we do a lot of user research. Human-centred design is incredibly important. It is how we understand the stories and the ways that people will want to achieve their goals for the 20%. And so doing user research with those 20% rather than just with the easy-to-reach 80% is hugely important because it helps us understand a different worldview and a different way of approaching things and a different set of barriers to what we face in our lives. Everybody faces barriers at different times, whether temporary or permanent. But people face different barriers and they have different resources on hand to overcome those barriers and understanding what those are means that you can try to remove as many of them as possible.

HC: So it obviously makes so much sense what you're saying—of course, why wouldn't we design for the 20%? So why aren't things this way already?

CD: I'm going to say something controversial—because the world is designed for white, straight, middle-class, middle-aged, cisgendered men. It's designed by them and it's designed for them, and they have been the dominant power in this world for thousands of years. And so, when you are in the majority where you don't face any obvious barriers, where nothing is particularly difficult—I'm sure there are many people who would say their lives are difficult and of course everybody's experience of their life is relative and they will face difficulties—but they don't face necessarily the extremities of difficulty that other people do.

I wrote a blog a few months ago called ‘Accessibility as a Choice’, and I had some interesting reactions from my deliberately provocative title. People saying, “It's not that I chose not to be accessible, it's that I was ignorant. I didn't realise it wasn't accessible.” I said, no, the choice was made much earlier than that. The choice was made by society not to value people like me.

If society valued people like me, we would be educated alongside mainstream children wherever possible. We would be visible in the media. We would have storylines about ourselves in books, in magazines, in films—and it wouldn't just be that the storyline is about that person and their disability. It would be that that person is a full character who has a full role in that play or that book or that TV series. And their disability is a part of them, but it isn't what defines them. It isn't the only interesting story about them.

So that visibility—or lack of it—has been a choice. We have been erased from history, as have women and disabled people, as have people of colour. We have been erased from the stories that we tell ourselves in our cultures. Culture is the collection of myths and stories and means and ways of doing things that we tell each other and we pass on to each other and we pass on to the next generation. So it perpetuates down the ages. And there has been an erasure of people like myself.

If we are seen, if we are understood, if we're seen as valuable—not necessarily just for what we contribute, but valuable in our existence, worthy of living, which in many places the disabled still are not—then people would consider us. Because their family members would be people like me. Their friends would be people like me. The kid who goes to school with their child would be people like me or people like my partner or people like my friends.

And so the rich tapestry of what makes us who we are as a society would be that much more colourful and that much more interesting. But also, we would be much more visible and less sidelined. And therefore, the people who are designing things, the people who are creating, for instance, health technology, would automatically think of us because they'd be thinking of their friend, of their colleague, of their daughter, of their son, of their friends.

HC: Because then it's real, because then they can relate and associate with that experience.

CD: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. And even though if you've met one disabled person, you've met one disabled person. We're all different. And a disabled person can be just as nice or just as nasty as anybody else—we don't have a monopoly on being nice. But if you have got friends who are different from you, you are in the habit of thinking about things from other people's perspectives, and therefore it makes it easier to open your eyes to other perspectives that you might not have in front of you as an example. But you can now imagine because you have learned to think outside of your own viewpoint.

HC: And opens your eyes up to all of the joy and exciting things that other people have to bring, right?

CD: Absolutely. And the value that that person has, mainly by existing in your life, yeah.

HC: So it's clear how making everything—buildings, houses, digital tech—accessible is so important and is needed for anything to get better or move forward. Can you think of anywhere that does this really well already? What was a good success story?

CD: Absolutely. There are a lot of them. So if you look at gov.uk, which is the government website here in the United Kingdom, gov.uk has been designed specifically with various access needs in mind. And they actually have a design system and the service manual that gives you templates and components that you can reuse. So they've done the extensive user research to make everything that they build as accessible to a maximum number of people as possible. And then they put it out there for you to be able to replicate. You can change the colour schemes and so on, but if they've already done the majority of the work, why wouldn't you borrow it? It's out there free to use.

And the NHS has done the same. We have something called the digital service manual. So the great thing about the NHS service manual, which is also free to use to anybody, is that it creates components that anyone can reuse. And the hard work around doing user research with multiple groups who have multiple different access needs has already been done for you, and so you're on to the next level. You're already a step forward if you're using these kinds of components. So you might, for instance, do research about the particular content of your website or your system. But you already know that those sizes of buttons or those particular fonts are going to be accessible and meet the required standards. So even down to that level of detail—that's in the manual, yes, awesome.

Absolutely. The manual for gov.uk and nhs.uk both operate to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2, which came into force in October 2024. And those guidelines are the standards—worldwide standards—for how we do accessibility, and they come in three levels. Single A is a small amount of accessibility to people with very, very basic barriers to overcome. AA Accessibility is the standard that most organisations would work to. It's a high level of accessibility for a broad range of people across the population. And then organisations that specialise in maybe a particular area—for instance, the Royal Society for the Blind—their website, at least in the components that affect people with visual impairment, meets AAA standard. Very few organisations are going to meet the whole of AAA. It's usually in a specific field because they engage with the user group that has that level of barrier to overcome. So AA standard is the standard that I would advise most health technology companies and organisations to be using—unless their particular service is going to be engaging with a group that faces very high barriers to access.

HC: What advice would you give to a budding health tech innovator who wants to make their device or app or service really accessible?

CD: Go and talk to somebody who's different to you. Go and find out what they're interested in, what they use, what they find useful. What they're like, what they use in their work, what they do in their spare time, how they see the world and how their condition or their upbringing or the environment in which they currently live and work has affected them. Go and see through somebody else's eyes. It will really change the way that you live and the way that you work. Just be prepared for the fact that it's not just going to change your health product—it's going to change you.

HC: So step into their shoes or their wheels for the day.

CD: Absolutely. Yeah. Come sit in my wheels and use my golf ball to drive around rather than my joystick. Come and experience what it's like.

HC: I had an excellent time speaking with Claire, so here are some of the key points I took from our conversation. I really loved Claire's definition of accessibility—making something easy and straightforward to do regardless of any kind of impairment. Putting people at the centre of any design process ensures that your product or service is truly fit for purpose. And of course, making sure that the people you're speaking to and involving have different experiences than your own and each other. I also liked what Claire said about when you're designing for the 20% rather than the 80%, you may find that you come across surprise benefits for everyone—like the example she gave of drop curbs being helpful for mothers pushing prams or people carrying heavy luggage.

There are links to the web accessibility guidelines that Claire mentioned in the show notes, also links to the NHS manual that Claire mentioned—that's super helpful. Thanks so much for listening and see you next time.