Ever since I started doing this job (UX/UI Designer, for more than ten years), I have seen accessibility treated always and only as a technical item, an extra, something to be sorted out at the end of projects or, worse, an element that concerned only the public administration.
In reality, at European level (and in Italy too, to be honest), public-sector websites and apps have been regulated for more than twenty years on this particular aspect as well (for those who want to dig deeper, we are talking about the Web Accessibility Directive).
The real leap, however, came with the European Accessibility Act, which since June 2025 has made accessibility a concrete requirement for the private market too.
Why do we need to talk about it now? Because in March this year AgID (the Agency for Digital Italy) released new guidelines specifically on the accessibility of services, making the operational framework much clearer (and more precise).
It is clear, then, that at this point accessibility can no longer be considered an extra, an avoidable or postponable topic, an item that, after all, we can skip on the to-do list when we design a digital service. Now accessibility must be regarded as a baseline criterion by which we can judge the quality of our sites and apps.
So today the question to ask is this: how do we meet a genuine need and precise regulations?
Here is one possible answer: by making your service easily perceivable, usable and understandable, as well as robust from a design standpoint. It is also important to ensure that all information on how the service works and how to use it is clearly accessible, as well as compatible with assistive technologies (screen readers, voice recognition, etc.).
When we ignore these pillars, we first introduce a compliance problem with our digital product, but we also become the authors of a problem of experience, autonomy and inclusion that people are increasingly starting to talk about.
The point, then, is not only “how do I avoid a legal problem”, but also “what kind of experience do I really want to design”: and our design should therefore aim for a site (or an app) with clearer visual hierarchies, readable text, consistent navigation, understandable forms and well-built interactions. Because a site built this way works better for everyone. It works better for those who need to use a screen reader, of course, but also for those who are tired, distracted, not tech-savvy or who simply want to visit a website without friction.
In this sense, accessibility stops being a niche topic and becomes a very concrete measure of the quality of the user experience.
Accessibility can no longer be tacked on downstream, perhaps as an (optional!) correction to what has already been designed. The decree and the Guidelines in fact treat accessibility as an essential requirement that concerns the entire execution, delivery and maintenance of the service over time: it involves and touches every element we create, from content to support information and, as mentioned earlier, to compatibility with assistive tools and technologies.
In practice, a “beautiful” site is not enough; it needs to be thought through “well”.
For a great many companies it is a more immediate and urgent issue than one might think: the European Accessibility Act in fact covers e-commerce, banking services, digital communications, transport and access to media (both audio and video).
Not all private digital services automatically fall within the same scope, but for those who sell online, manage bookings, payments, restricted areas or digital customer journeys, accessibility is now a business matter.
There is then another important aspect.
Today you can no longer say that practical references are lacking. The technical standards exist and are part of the operational framework referred to by AgID (EN 301 549 and the well-known WCAG). A clarification is useful here: the regulatory framework is not identical for everyone and includes specific exceptions; but precisely for this reason the smartest choice is not to wait to figure out, perhaps at the end, “whether I’m in or out” in theory, but to start from a concrete assessment of your own digital ecosystem.
It follows that, within the design process itself, steps such as an initial audit, UX/UI design, copywriting and micro-copy, managing accessibility in front-end development, QA, and finally documentation and componentry are definitely to be addressed.
What does all this mean? That effective accessibility does not come from a widget installed at the last minute. It comes from a method.
In short, accessibility today is an excellent maturity test for brands and companies. It tells you how genuinely a service is designed for people, how robust it is over time and how responsibly the project was built. Regulation is the starting point, but a truth that has always been valid and obvious (even without a law to declare it) is this: that digital that excludes is digital designed badly.
And today it is much harder to defend.
