7 Essential Insights on Why Good Designers Create Inaccessible Websites (And How to Fix It)

You know the drill: a beautifully crafted website that looks stunning but leaves half your users squinting at faded text or fumbling with tiny buttons. How does this happen when the designers behind it are genuinely caring people? The answer lies in a hidden gap between intention and execution—and the solution might be simpler than you think. Buckle up for seven eye-opening truths about accessibility, designer blind spots, and a radical proposal to bridge the gap.

1. Designers Mean Well, But Good Intentions Aren’t Enough

Ask any designer if they want to exclude users, and you’ll get an emphatic “no.” They pour empathy into their work, striving for clarity and beauty. Yet exclusion happens—subtly, silently. A low-contrast color palette might look elegant but defeats readability for millions with low vision. A complex gesture-based navigation may feel intuitive to a tech-savvy designer but locks out users with motor impairments. The disconnect isn’t malice; it’s a blind spot caused by cognitive overload. With a deluge of guidelines—from usability heuristics to accessibility standards—even the best designers can’t hold it all in mind. The result? Accidental exclusion, not intentional harm.

2. Accessibility Isn’t a Niche Concern—It’s Life-or-Death

Consider a simple bus timetable app. Miss a stop because the text is too small? That might mean missing your daughter’s fifth birthday party. Fail to navigate the schedule due to confusing labels? You could miss the chance to say goodbye to a dying grandparent. These aren’t hypotheticals—they’re real-world consequences of design oversights. As Aral Balkan powerfully argued, “pretty much everything we design can affect life events and death events.” Accessibility isn’t about ticking boxes; it’s about enabling people to be where they need to be, physically and emotionally. Every design choice can tip the scales.

3. We Know the Diversity of Human Abilities—But Forget to Act

Designers intellectually understand that not everyone sees perfectly, hears perfectly, thinks the same way, or moves the same way. Yet when it’s time to make decisions, this knowledge evaporates under the weight of deadlines, aesthetics, and feature lists. The curse of knowledge kicks in: we assume our own abilities are universal. We forget that color blindness affects 1 in 12 men, that cognitive fatigue makes dense text unreadable, or that voice interfaces are essential for many. The gap between knowing and doing is where exclusion breeds.

4. There’s Too Much to Remember—That’s the Real Problem

Think about the sheer volume of expertise a modern web designer must juggle: typography, color theory, responsive layout, performance optimization, SEO, security basics—and then accessibility standards like WCAG, ARIA, and inclusive design patterns. The list is overwhelming. No human can recall all these rules on demand. As result, designers rely on intuition, which often defaults to what’s familiar or visually pleasing. The system is flawed not because designers are lazy, but because the cognitive load is unrealistic. We need a smarter way to bring critical information to the forefront.

5. A Classic Heuristic Holds the Key: “Recognition Rather Than Recall”

Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, from the 1990s, are still gold. In particular, Heuristic #6: Recognition rather than recall. Originally aimed at users (“make information visible or easily retrievable when needed”), I propose we flip it for designers. Let’s make the information required to produce the design visible and retrievable at the moment of decision. Instead of forcing designers to memorize accessibility principles, we embed cues into tools, templates, and processes. For example, a design system that flags low contrast or missing alt text in real time. Or a checklist that appears during a project review. By reducing reliance on memory, we free designers to focus on creativity and empathy.

6. Practical Steps to Integrate “Recognition” Into Your Workflow

How do you put this into action? Start by auditing your design tools. Do they have built-in accessibility checkers? If not, add plugins or custom tests. Next, create a designer-friendly cheat sheet—not a wall of WCAG rules, but a one-page visual guide with common pitfalls (e.g., contrast ratios, touch targets, heading hierarchy). Use pair design sessions where one person focuses solely on accessibility. Finally, embrace heuristic reviews at early stages, not just before launch. The goal is to make accessibility a visible part of every decision, not a forgotten afterthought.

7. There’s Already a Great Blueprint: “A Web for Everyone”

Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery’s book, A Web for Everyone—Designing Accessible User Experiences, provides a practical framework for weaving accessibility into the design process. It emphasizes that accessibility isn’t a feature—it’s a lens through which all design decisions should be viewed. The book offers clear principles, personas, and checklists that align perfectly with the “recognition rather than recall” approach. It’s a must-read for any team serious about moving from good intentions to genuinely inclusive designs. Return to the heuristic discussion to see how this book applies the concept.

We’ve seen that good designers can still produce bad websites—not from apathy, but from an overloaded brain. The solution isn’t to demand more memorization; it’s to design our own workflows with the same empathy we extend to users. By making accessibility information visible and retrievable at the point of creation, we can finally align our good intentions with inclusive outcomes. The web is for everyone—let’s build it that way, one smartly designed process at a time.