From concept to finished product, designers face important moral and practical civil-rights questions of equal access to all users:

• Can experience designers place design considerations ahead of the needs of people with disabilities? Is a bold design statement that will do wonders to the product but render the product unusable to a user justifiable?
• Are experience designers responsible for pressing the issue of accessibility on corporations, and advocating accessible design, despite the potential added costs associated with the production of accessible products?

The sad reality is that society, architects and designers included, has ignored the issue of accessibility for the most part of human history. It has been through long civil rights struggles that the needs of people with disabilities have finally been codified. The Americans with Disabilities Rights (ADA), for example, was signed into law only in 1990. In a nutshell, the law states that:

Similar laws exist in many countries around the world. After years of ineffective attempts to encourage organizations to invest in making their products and services accessible, fear of expensive legal action is leading to an increase in the number of accessible physical and digital products.

One of the fundamental priorities when thinking about accessible design is eliminating the social stigma around mental and physical disabilities by ensuring the full inclusion of all people in the same experience by accommodating special needs. In other words, don't segregate users with disabilities-- for example, the common practice at the turn of the century, of creating text-only version of websites, sometimes with less content, for visually impaired users. These site were meant to be processed by screen readers and other assistive-technology devices, and while better than having no access at all, still were a crude solution.

Today on the digital front, leading vendors of operating systems such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft fully integrated a wide array of accessibility features into their operating systems, making it easy for software developers to make their own products natively accessible.

In the United States, as in other countries, ADA has brought a welcome improvement to the physical world, as laws and the enforcement of codes governing accessibility eliminated barriers that rendered many types of public property--including government and commercial buildings, businesses, sidewalks, and public transportation--inaccessible to people with disabilities. The improvements ended up benefiting everyone, not just the disabled--parents with baby strollers, people with shopping carts, and delivery people benefit from mandated sidewalk slopes, for example.

Staircases provide highly visible evidence of the extent of taking into account accessibility considerations in design thinking. The preceding image has a number of examples that illustrate fundamental issues of experience accessibility as reflected in the design of staircases.