Design For All How Inclusive Design Benefits Brands & Audiences

It was built for wheelchair users, but hen a funny thing happened. An architect studying foot traffic at a Florida mall found that 90% of "unencumbered pedestrians" (people with strollers, rolling luggage, delivery carts, tired feet) went out of their way to use the curb cut too. Built for some. Used by everyone.

That's the whole argument for inclusive design in one slab of concrete. Unglamorous, yet highly effective. And most brands still treat it like a chore instead of a business opportunity.

What is inclusive design in branding?

Inclusive design (you'll also hear "universal design") means building your brand so people of all abilities, ages, and backgrounds can use it (and, importantly, without a separate "accessible version" or accessibility widget bolted on as an afterthought).

In practice that's the not-so-sexy stuff, but like the concrete, it’s foundational: color contrast a low-vision customer can read, alt text a screen reader can speak aloud, captions on your video, fonts that don't dissolve at small sizes, language that doesn't assume everyone shares your idioms. It’s not a wheelchair-ramp version of your website, it’s website that works for the wheelchair user and everyone else.

Here's the deal: disability isn't a niche. According to the CDC, it's over a quarter of American adults, and it's the only minority group any of us can join at any moment, especially as we grow older. Design for the edges and you’ll catch the middle on the way.

How does accessibility affect ROI?

This is where people expect moral flag waving. I'd rather wave a spreadsheet.

• People with disabilities and their families control an estimated $13 trillion in annual disposable income. That’s more purchasing power than China and Japan combined. That's not a sympathy market. That's a market.
• And most brands lock the door on it: 95.9% of websites fail basic accessibility tests. In the UK alone, businesses are estimated to lose around £2 billion a month because disabled customers hit a barrier and simply click away to a competitor who didn't make them work for it.
• It also pays off in loyalty: 54% of disabled consumers say they're more likely to buy from companies that represent disability authentically. When accessible options are rare, the brands that get it right earn repeat business and word-of-mouth advocacy that's almost impossible to buy.

Now the other side of the ledger: the cost of ignoring it. Ask Domino's.

In 2016, a blind man named Guillermo Robles sued Domino's because he couldn't order a pizza on its website or app using a screen reader. Domino's fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing the ADA shouldn't apply to websites at all. In October 2019, the Court declined to hear the case, leaving the ruling against them standing and opening the floodgates on website accessibility lawsuits nationwide.

The kicker? The barriers Robles hit were common, fixable issues. The legal bill and brand damage of fighting dwarfed what it would've cost to just fix the site—a fix that would've opened the door to more paying customers, not fewer. They answered "do we legally have to?" instead of "should we?" and paid for the wrong question.

So: ROI on inclusive design isn't soft. It's a bigger addressable market, lower legal exposure, and (because of the curb-cut effect) a better product for everyone, which shows up as cleaner UX, stronger SEO, and higher conversion across your whole audience.

Quick wins to make your branding more inclusive

You don't need to rebuild everything by Friday. A handful of moves deliver most of the value, and every one of them helps your non-disabled audience too. Curb cuts, all the way down

If you want the whole thing on one screen, here's the cheat sheet: each move, who it's nominally "for," and who actually ends up benefiting:

But here's the trap: "make the brand accessible" gets assigned to nobody, so it happens to nothing. Accessibility isn't one team's chore. It's a property of every output your brand ships, which means it belongs to every team that ships one. The fix is to stop talking about it in the abstract and hand each team the specific deliverables they already own.

Your brand doesn't live in a guidelines PDF. It lives in the emails, decks, posts, packages, and screens other people build every day. So here's who owns what.

Brand & design. You set the rules everyone else inherits, so your defaults matter most. Pick a core palette that passes WCAG contrast ratios and bake the passing combinations right into the brand guidelines, so no one downstream has to guess. Choose a primary typeface that stays legible at small sizes and give decorative fonts a clear "headlines only" rule. Ship an accessible color and type system, not just a pretty one.

Web & product. You own the highest-stakes surface. Make the site keyboard-navigable, enforce alt text on every meaningful image (your SEO benefits too—search engines read it), and publish an accessibility statement that invites feedback. Ship a site a screen-reader user can actually check out on.

Content & social. Your outputs go out daily and compound. Caption every video, write alt text on social images, break up walls of text, and skip the jargon and idioms that trip up non-native readers. Ship captions and alt text as a default step, not a favor.

Marketing & campaigns. You decide who sees themselves in the work. Cast for real diversity of age, race, and ability instead of token stock photos, and pressure-test taglines for plain-language clarity. Ship a campaign that represents the audience it's trying to win, 54% of disabled consumers buy more from brands that do.

Sales & CX. You're the brand in a human voice. Make one-pagers and decks readable (contrast and structure, not five-point font), and make sure email templates and help docs work with a screen reader. Ship collateral and support a customer can use on the first try.

Everyone who touches a document. The brand is also every internal deck, proposal, and PDF. Use real heading styles instead of just bold text, add alt text to charts, and don't bury meaning in color alone ("click the red one" fails for a colorblind reader). Ship documents that carry their meaning in structure, not just styling.

Notice the through-line: none of these are a special "accessibility project." They're the outputs each team already makes, made slightly better. And every one is a curb cut. Captions weren't built for Gen Z watching on mute, but 70% of them use captions anyway. Voice control was built for motor impairments; now it's how the rest of us text while cooking. Do the work once, per output, and it pays off across your entire audience.

So back to that curb cut in Kalamazoo

Inclusive design fails when it's framed as compliance: a checklist you grudgingly tick to dodge a lawsuit. Framed that way, it's pure cost, it lands on nobody's desk, and you'll do the bare minimum right up until the demand letter shows up.

Framed correctly, it's the same insight those disabled veterans forced onto the sidewalk in 1945: when you design for the person at the edge, you almost always build something better for the person in the middle. The wheelchair user gets the curb cut. The parent with the stroller, the traveler with the suitcase, the delivery driver with the dolly: they all get it too. Nobody had to build a second ramp.

Your brand works the same way. The captions, the contrast, the plain language, the alt text. Each one opens the door a little wider for someone who was being turned away, and every one of those doors happens to swing for the whole crowd behind them. Wider audience. Deeper loyalty. Lower legal risk. Better UX across the board.

So don't hand accessibility to a task force and hope. Hand each team the one output they already own and ask them to make it work for one more person. Design for everyone isn't charity. It's just design that bothered to finish.