Illustration: four people leaning side by side against a wall, looking ahead — a woman with dark glasses and a white cane, a woman in a wheelchair, a man with folded arms, and a young woman wearing a beanie.
ARTICLES | ACCESSIBILITY08/07/2026

Completing the IxDF course “Design for All”

How can inclusive design help make digital products more accessible, more robust and better for everyone?

An approach that reaches well beyond accessibility alone

I completed the Interaction Design Foundation course “Design for All” by Frank Spillers, service designer as well as founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics, and was awarded the “Top 10% Course Taker” distinction. At its core, Design for All means shaping products and services so that they are accessible, usable and meaningful to as many people as possible, regardless of their abilities, impairments or contexts of use.

Design for All goes beyond accessibility alone: it treats accessibility not as a correction applied afterwards but as a fixed part of the design and development process. Where user-centred design puts people at the centre without always covering the full range of human needs, Design for All accounts for that range from the outset. Universal design often pursues the idea of one solution for everyone, above all in physical environments and products. Inclusive design, in turn, puts more weight on actively involving underrepresented user groups. Design for All connects these perspectives and carries them consistently over to digital products, services and organisations.

What I took away from it

  • Building accessibility into design and development processes early and proactively
  • Applying standards such as WCAG and going beyond them to improve usability and quality
  • Designing for a range of needs, among them visual, auditory, cognitive and motor impairments
  • Building interfaces that work with assistive technology such as screen readers, captions and alternative input methods
  • Using practical techniques such as ARIA markup and descriptive alt text where they belong
  • Making the business case for accessibility through return on investment, market reach and brand trust
  • Evaluating products with accessibility checks and templates
  • Setting up accessibility programmes and anchoring them so they scale across an organisation
Course certificate from the Interaction Design Foundation for Eike Otto, membership number 179262, issued on 7 August 2026 for the course “Accessibility: How to Design for All”, marked “Distinction: Top 10% in class” and signed by the two IxDF founders Mads Soegaard and Rikke Friis Dam.
IxDF course certificate for “Design for All”

Certificate for the course