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From Empathy to Action:
The Power of Accessible UX Design
Lady That UX Meetup

by YuRong C.




© 2026 YuRong C. All rights reserved.
YuRong C.
A product designer with 12 years of experience shaping digital products across global tech companies like Meta, WeWork and Hopper. Based in Singapore for 8 years, my work spans design consultancy, AI Startups, travel tech, and social platforms.
I bring a deep commitment to inclusive design and tech equity, having led 10+ DEI talks within and beyond the companies I've worked at and serving as Disability Community Lead at Meta Singapore.
  • Lead Product Designer at Hopper
  • Senior Product Designer at Meta Singapore
  • Product Manager at WeWork Singapore
  • Disability Community Lead at Meta Singapore
About me and my ears 🦻


I was born with hearing loss, diagnosed at age 3 and fitted with hearing aids shortly after. Living with hearing loss has shaped not only how I experience the world, but how I think about design and inclusion.
In 2021, I made the decision to upgrade to bilateral cochlear implants. A life-changing step that gave me a new relationship with sound. I document this journey on social media as "Cyborg Lady Life: my new everyday with cochlear implants."

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電音女子放電中 - 我的人工電子耳新日常

電音女子放電中 - 我的人工電子耳新日常. 939 likes · 5 talking about this. 🔎 IG: cyborg.lady.life 新加坡Meta的產品設計人 I'm a cyborg product designer at Meta Singapore 🇸🇬 with bilateral CI.

A WeWork business trip to New York
became the starting point of my commitment to inclusion
Diversity showed me what inclusion could look like
Today, let's talk about…
1. First, let's rethink what 'normal' really means
Why the idea of a 'standard body' was never real
2. Accessible design 101
Accessible / Inclusive / Universal design
3. From insight to impact: building inclusive products and culture
Real stories, hard-won lessons, and a framework you can use tomorrow
1. First, let's rethink what 'normal' really means
Why the idea of a 'standard body' was never real
What does it feel like to not hear? Watch this — with the sound off.

Could you follow along without a single sound?
I could. By reading their lips.

Suddenly, the roles flip — and the people we call "disabled" are the ones who understand.
Let's challenge a word we use every day
The words 'able' and 'disabled' : who decided where the line is?


❶ Disability isn’t a flaw in the person. It’s a flaw in the fit
Change the environment to match the human, and “disabled” can become “enabled”

Disability
≠
Personal
Human
Condition
Disability
=
Mismatched
Human
Interactions
Disability isn't binary, it exists on a spectrum we all move through
Think about your own life: when have you been the one who needed more support?


❷ There is no "normal body". There's only a spectrum we all live on
  • "Ableism" treats a disabled body as a broken version of a person, a defect to be fixed.
  • "Anti-ableism" says: every body, at every stage, is valid. Not broken. Not lesser. Just different.
  • From birth to old age, our bodies change. Disability isn't an exception. It's written into being human.

We will all experience changes in our bodies. Accessible design isn't charity, it's designing for all of us, including our future selves.

How we think about bodies shapes how we build societies. Ableism excludes. Anti-ableism includes. The choice is in our design decisions.
“But people with disabilities are a minority… so why should we design for them?”
It’s a familiar assumption. But one worth questioning.
How many people worldwide live with a disability?
1%? 5%? 10%?
Out of the world’s 8.2 billion people, how many live with a disability?

A: 80 M
About the size of Germany
B: 500 M
Roughly one in 16 people
C: 1.3 B
Nearly one in six people

Here’s the answer: 1.3 billion people live with a disability
C: 1.3 B
That's 1 in 6 people on Earth. Did you get it right?
Surprise: disability affects 1 in 6 people

1.3 billion
A human story at a massive scale
People navigating disability every day — at school, at work, at home, and in public.
≈ 16%
About one-sixth of humanity
Far from rare — it’s a part of daily life for communities everywhere.
≈ India’s population
Enough people to fill a country
That’s roughly the size of India — a scale that should shape how we design the world.
🦻 Hearing disability affects everyday life
1.5 B
Hearing loss
About 1 in 5 people worldwide live with hearing loss above 20 dB — from missed words to everyday moments that slip by.
430 M
Disabling hearing loss
Roughly 5.2% of the world faces hearing loss above 35 dB — enough to make conversations, learning, and connection much harder.
≒ SA
South America-sized
That’s about the population of South America — a whole continent of people whose lives are shaped by hearing loss.
👓 Vision disability affects everyday life
2.2 billion
Vision impairment
About 1 in 4 people live with vision impairment — from blurred signs and missed faces to daily tasks that take extra effort.
≒ 3× Europe
All of Europe is ~744 million
That’s nearly three times Europe’s population — a vast group of people navigating the world with less sight and more strain.
🫥 Invisible disability
Cognitive disability, autism…
The biggest barriers are often the ones nobody notices
Many people seem “fine” at a glance, while everyday tasks like reading, focusing, processing information, or keeping up in conversation can take far more effort.
13.9%
1 in 7 people in the U.S. live with a cognitive disability
That’s millions of people carrying invisible challenges through work, school, and daily life—often without others realizing they need support.
We all belong here

Disability is not distant, it’s part of our shared humanity.
Being inclusive starts with changing how we see one another.
When 1 in 6 people lives with a disability, it touches all of us—directly, through family or friends, or in the communities we share.

2. Accessible design 101

Accessible Design
(A11y Design)
Design that removes barriers so more people can use the same product, service, or space with ease, dignity, and confidence.
Also called: Accessibility Design / A11y Design


For example: a curb cut that makes sidewalks usable, captions that let you follow a video in a noisy room, or a screen reader that turns buttons into spoken words.
Accessible Design vs. Inclusive Design

Both aim to improve usability and accessibility, but differ in approach and emphasis.
Accessible vs. Inclusive vs. Universal Design
Three design approaches, one shared goal: make things easier to use for more people.
Accessible Design
Remove the roadblocks. It’s built to help people with disabilities use something comfortably and independently.
  • Screen readers that speak website content aloud for blind users
  • Live video captions that let you follow along without sound
Inclusive Design
Design for real human variety. It makes room for different abilities, accents, ages, and contexts instead of assuming one “normal” user.
  • Adjustable text sizes for tired eyes, small screens, and everything in between
  • Voice input that understands different accents and speech patterns
  • Elevator buttons at two heights so more people can reach them easily
Universal Design
Works well for almost everyone, right away. The design is simple enough and flexible enough to fit most people without extra setup.
  • Auto-sensing restroom doors that open hands-free for anyone carrying bags, kids, or mobility aids
What resources help you design accessible interfaces?
UX Accessibility Guidelines

Standards & guidelines
Read accessibility and inclusive-design guidelines from WCAG / Microsoft / Google.

  1. Hot off the press: WCAG 2.2 was just revised on 12 December 2024 🍞

www.w3.org

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also often make Web content more usable to users in general.

  1. Microsoft's classic Inclusive Design guidelines

inclusive.microsoft.design

Microsoft Inclusive Design

Microsoft Inclusive Design is a practice that anyone who creates and manages products and services can use to build more inclusive experiences for everyone. Get the principles, guidebooks, workshop tools, videos, and many more free resources.

  1. Google, Designing Inclusive Products for Everyone (now with AI)

google

Designing Inclusive Products for Everyone — Google

Learn how Google uses inclusive technology and design practices to build products and services that create equitable experiences for everyone.


Website accessibility checklist
Use The Essential WCAG Checklist for Website Accessibility, checking your design against A, AA, AAA priority levels.

www.a11yproject.com

Checklist - The A11Y Project

A beginner's guide to digital accessibility.



Tools
Use tools like color-blindness simulators to support accessible design.


3. From insight to impact: building inclusive products and culture
Building inclusive products and culture
Design Impact =
Expertise ✕ Communication ✕ Action

Expertise
Build the knowledge to design with confidence.
❶ Learn inclusive-design standards
❷ Apply insights from diverse users
Communication
Turn insight into buy-in.
❶ Work at the right level to make accessibility scale
❷ Lead with the argument your team can't ignore
▶ Case study: WeWork Occupancy Map
❶ Work at the right level to make accessibility scale
Focus on systems and standards — the higher you go, the more your accessibility work compounds to scale

❷ Lead with the argument your team can't ignore
Frame accessible design as a force multiplier for trust, innovation, and growth

The ethical case
Accessibility is the right thing to do

Guiding questions:
  • Who are we leaving behind, and why are we okay with that?
  • If someone can’t use it, is it truly fair to call it access? Do they have alternatives?
The technical case
Accessibility opens up better ways to build

Guiding questions:
  • What existing tech could make this more usable for everyone?
  • What could we unlock if accessibility became a design constraint, not an afterthought?
The business case
Inclusive design grows the business

Guiding questions:
  • How much market are we missing by excluding people?
  • What would adoption and retention look like if more people could actually use it?
Case Study
WeWork Occupancy Map


Project goal:
Build a floor-plan sales tool for internal sales and operations teams to update and display the layout of coworking suites and each suite's leasing status.
Background
Sales teams were literally drawing floor plans in slides
Lease status lived in Google Slides, where color did the heavy lifting and every update had to be hand-tweaked.
  • Red — leased
  • Green — available
  • Yellow — temporarily reserved
Shipping the MVP:
Six weeks from research interviews to a working product, designing and building the core sales experience at speed

Engineers: happily dove into development
Then I noticed something…
wait a minute.
They were using red and green to show occupancy.
As a PM, a designer, a researcher, it hit me, "How would that read for someone with red-green color blindness? 🚥"

💭 I wanted to build accessibility in from day one, not bolt it on later

1
Design a color-blind friendly theme switch

2
Communicate to the team why accessible color themes matter
3
Gather real feedback from the sales team

❶ Design a color-blind friendly theme switch
Testing until we found the right color-blind-friendly palette

Default version
Color-blind-friendly version

❷ Communicate to the team why accessible color themes matter

Communication point 1: Lead with the numbers

"Color blindness affects more people than we think. We can't afford to ignore it." 👓 Color blindness worldwide Color blind ~4.5% of people worldwide are color blind 8% of men are color blind 0.5% of women are color blind 99% are red-green color blind What does this mean for WeWork? Here's the real impact on our team. All employees Sales & operations managers Potentially blocked by color blindness

Communication point 2: Seeing is believing

Showing the team exactly what a color-blind user experiences A common pushback: "Even without red-green blindness, can't users still tell the colors apart?" A: Normal theme B: Accessible theme


Once they saw it for themselves, the engineers were on board
We moved fast — and built a working internal prototype together 👏🏼

The Occupancy map launched
Designing for inclusion from the start and it paid off
The result
Real users with color blindness noticed and appreciated it 🥳
"I'm really impressed you thought about color-blind usability from the very beginning!"

Reflection: what would I do differently next time?
Action
❶ Build trust with your team
❷ Champion accessibility through community

► Case study: design-community advocacy inside Meta
My community advocacy and design support inside Meta
Starting from personal expertise, to building team trust and everyday rapport

Inclusive Communication Workshop
In my first month, nearly "dying" in the team's rapid-fire meetings because the meetings were not inclusive
First all-Singapore team talk → talk to the design org at U.S. HQ
Meta Accessibility Design Tool Kit
& Accessibility Summit
Contributing internal community resources for accessibility testing
Weaving inclusive-design principles into everyday projects
Acting as the team's inclusive design expert & resource
India – voice explanation of Ads Manager interface
A voice-explanation feature built for low-literacy advertisers in India.
Proposed adding a spoken-content script to the audio playback.
Lead Meta Disability Community @Apac
Brand identity design — originally "Differently Abled @APAC"
Inspired by the gesture of "d" & "a" in sign language (Abbreviation of Differently Abled)
Scaling impact from APAC to global HQ

Disability@ Community Summit APAC
Speaking at the company's annual Global Disability Summit, broadcast across four time zones
Key Takeaways
Design Impact= Expertise ✕ Communication ✕ Action

1
Start with empathy for body diversity
Challenge assumptions about what's 'normal.' Understanding the full spectrum of bodies and abilities is where inclusive design begins.
2
Turn knowledge into action
Apply proven frameworks and real-world cases to design accessibly, and make your impact felt across the team.
3
Embed inclusion from the very start
Don't retrofit: build accessibility into the foundation so every product works for everyone, from day one.
You are the wizard who brings change and magic to the world 🪄

A designer's ability to deeply feel the diversity of the world, to communicate precisely, and to elevate the human experience is truly unique. Technological equity is the greatest blessing tech people can give to the world.
Technological equity means everyone gets to benefit from technology — not just a privileged few.
YuRong C.


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電音女子放電中 - 我的人工電子耳新日常

電音女子放電中 - 我的人工電子耳新日常. 939 likes · 5 talking about this. 🔎 IG: cyborg.lady.life 新加坡Meta的產品設計人 I'm a cyborg product designer at Meta Singapore 🇸🇬 with bilateral CI.

Bonus: A broader view
Equity-Focused Design
Equity-focused design tackles systemic inequality head-on — closing gaps in resources and opportunity by creating products and services that actively level the playing field.
Also known as equity-oriented design.

Examples:
  • A low-cost solar lamp bringing light to remote communities without electricity
  • An online learning platform that opens doors to quality education for students who can't otherwise afford it


Xbox: Designing a controller so every gamer can play
Normal Xbox wireless controller
Designed for full hand mobility — leaving many players behind
Xbox Adaptive Controller
Built for gamers with limited mobility — featuring large programmable buttons that connect to external switches, mounts, and joysticks, so more people can play on their own terms.