Our digital experience is being rapidly transformed by emerging technologies like generative AI, wearable health devices, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) platforms. These tools have taken the technology industry by storm by promising hyper-personalized interfaces, greater productivity, and more immersive environments. Yet, many of these tools fail to adequately serve a significant portion of the population: disabled people. Historically, accessibility in technology has been relegated to a late-stage consideration addressed through add-on features rather than baked-in design principles. However, the key to more ethical, creative, and universally usable technology lies in a paradigm shift integrating accessibility from the very beginning of the design process.

Technology companies seem to be taking a greater interest in accessibility, with a projected $37 billion market by 2029, underscoring both ethical and economic incentives for inclusive innovation. Forbes-recognized innovations such as Be My Eyes—which integrates with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to support low vision users—and Nuance Audio’s sleek eyewear that discreetly enhances hearing illustrate how the industry is growing to treat accessibility not as a niche feature, but as a design imperative. However, the question remains: is inclusion truly guiding design or merely being retrofitted for optics and market expansion? The answer lies in who is at the table when these products are being imagined and built.

The Case Against Retroactive Accessibility

In the United States, accessibility in technology has largely been driven by legal mandates such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. While these regulations have pushed companies to ensure minimum levels of usability for disabled users, they have also contributed to a mindset where accessibility is viewed as a constraint. This results in products that treat disabled users as edge cases. Even for designs meant to be centered around solving a disability-related problem, members of the disabled community can be easily sidelined rather than recognized as valuable contributors to the innovation process. Indeed, major tech firms continue to report low disability representation in their workforces, indicating the need for institutional change. Microsoft and Google hover at around 6% disability employment, landing well below the 28.7% of U.S. adults living with a disability. If companies are serious about inclusion, this gap must be addressed—not only in recruitment but also in leadership, compensation, and decision-making.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink offers a poignant example. Neuralink has promoted its invasive brain chip as a breakthrough for quadriplegic users by enabling them to control devices with their thoughts. However, the underlying design and deployment model reveal critical oversights. For instance, Neuralink’s lack of alignment with Durable Medical Equipment insurance standards renders its technology inaccessible to the vast majority of its target demographic. Furthermore, the company’s Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) study, a six-year-long trial exclusively recruiting patients with quadriplegia from cervical spinal cord injuries, only accepts participants with full-time caregivers. This choice excludes low-income and under-resourced quadriplegic people, and only including a privileged demographic in post-design trials fundamentally opposes the concept of inclusivity.

While this BCI innovation once entered the technology space as a tool for restoring autonomy to disabled patients, the company seems to strongly emphasize futuristic implications such as how “tightly coupling the human world to our digital machinery” will prevent the development of AI from outrunning human capacities, thereby obscuring how this technology addresses accessibility needs in the present day. This is only one example of many where disabled users are put on a pedestal as symbols of empowerment in public campaigns even though they are excluded from true decision-making power. The broader reality is that companies simply design for disabled people rather than with them.

Disability Drives Innovation

In contrast, several case studies from Microsoft demonstrate how inclusive, disability-led co-design can spur innovation and widespread adoption. For example, the team developing Visual Studio IntelliCode, a suite of AI-assisted tools aimed at improving developer productivity, went beyond traditional user segmentation methods. While Microsoft developers were building the tool, they specifically recruited a diverse sample of external developers who stood to benefit most from integrating IntelliCode with their programming workflow. Rather than selecting participants solely based on their programming language expertise, the team prioritized neurodiversity, assembling a group with varied cognitive styles and motivations to gain deeper insights into how different users write code. By doing so, the team at Microsoft and the recruited developers co-created a more intuitive and user-controllable suggestion system, creating a measurable impact: a 3.5-fold increase in regular users and a 176% rise in accepted code suggestions.

Similarly, Microsoft’s development of focus-enhancing features across Outlook and Windows emerged from participatory research with users who experience anxiety and attention challenges. These efforts led to redesigned calendar visuals, customized notification systems, and cross-platform tools that better respected users’ cognitive rhythms. The outcome was not only more inclusive, but it also improved user retention and satisfaction across a wider user base by reducing the overwhelming nature of productivity software. These examples demonstrate that designing for cognitive diversity is not merely inclusive and ethical, but also strategic. Supporting a neurodiverse audience indirectly benefits users of all demographics by expanding market reach and creating a more universally functional product. When products are built to accommodate a range of human needs, they are more adaptable, resilient, and impactful.

In the context of accessibility and beyond, the technology industry is seeing a significant shift towards creating a symbiosis between humans and technology. However, organizations must tackle questions about inclusion, oversight, and ethical deployment now, and 93% of executives agreed on the importance for organizations to innovate with purpose in the face of this change. As highlighted in the journal article “Co-Design: A Central Approach to the Inclusion of People with Disabilities,” reframing disability as a source of design expertise disrupts traditional hierarchies and invites a broader spectrum of creativity. This approach aligns with the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which asserts that accessible design is not merely a benefit but a human right.

What Co-Design Actually Looks Like

The key to moving beyond superficial inclusion lies in the distinction between user-centered design and co-design. User-centered design often casts disabled users as test subjects or sources of empathy through usability testing in later stages and marketing as accessible technology. However, it rarely gives participants agency over design decisions during ideation and prototyping itself. Co-design, by contrast, treats disabled people as collaborators throughout the development process. A Stanford Social Innovation Review essay explained that about half of persons with disabilities (49%) believe that technology places too much responsibility on them to adapt because their specific requirements are not met. This often results in disabled users engaging in User-Initiated Design (UID)—adapting products independently to meet their needs. Most notably, recognizing UID as a form of valid expertise enables technology companies to improve universal design by incorporating insights from disabled users, whose workarounds reveal what is needed to make a product truly functional.

The model of Active Support, for example, is a form of UID that enables adults with severe intellectual disabilities to meaningfully participate in ideation, prototyping, and evaluation tasks. Through structured facilitation and interpretation of nonverbal cues, researchers found that participants contributed insights that directly shaped product features. Though it was costly and labor-intensive, the experience was mutually beneficial—designers gained access to otherwise unattainable forms of knowledge and participants reported feelings of empowerment through sharing their unique insights. For this model to work best, institutions should allocate resources for facilitator training and scalability.

Furthermore, to meaningfully embed disabled voices into the design process, qualitative research must assume a foundational role. Traditional quantitative methods such as tracking patterns like click-through rates or error frequency can provide meaningful insight, but they fall short in capturing the complex, socially embedded nature of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). As technologies become increasingly personal, mobile, and context-sensitive, factors such as privacy, trust, identity, and social norms shape how people interact with systems in real time. These phenomena are difficult to quantify, and in some cases, impossible or unethical to experiment on directly. In response, HCI researchers are shifting toward qualitative methods to uncover motivations, perceptions, emotional dynamics, and community contexts that influence user behavior.

In particular, grounded theory helps designers build from real-world experiences. This approach allows researchers to inductively build theory on how a product can be more functional from user feedback rather than testing pre-defined hypotheses, which is especially critical when key questions or variables in a new technological domain are yet to be clearly defined. Unlike quantitative methods, which strive to minimize researcher influence, qualitative inquiry embraces subjectivity through reflexivity—the ongoing self-examination of how a researcher’s identity and assumptions shape findings. In the pursuit of inclusive UX, these interpretive lenses become vital tools for surfacing lived experiences that too often go ignored. Thus, co-design informed by qualitative insight leads to more ethical innovation because it begins with listening rather than assumption.

Conclusion: Rethinking Human-Centered Design

While user-centered design focuses on optimizing experiences for defined user tasks, human-centered design broadens the lens to consider the social, ethical, and systemic contexts that shape how people live, interact, and access technology. As technology becomes more embedded in our bodies, behaviors, and institutions, the stakes of exclusion rise. However, when companies employ true co-design to create human-centered systems, they must confront their own assumptions about who counts as “human” in their design personas. Accessibility is not a constraint on innovation, but rather a catalyst for it. Recognizing this truth is imperative for moving our schema of inclusive UX from modifying digital platforms after launch to structurally embedding the perspectives of disabled users throughout ideation, testing, and evaluation. Overall, accessibility must be considered a fundamental criterion for both ethics and excellence; by co-designing with disabled communities, we build a better world.