The UX-Conf Suisse organized on January 16, 2025 in Geneva brought together more than 80 professionals from the digital world, passionate men and women who came to understand the challenges of digital accessibility and discuss with several specialists who spoke during a round table and two conferences.
“It is important today to design digital experiences that are accessible!” By launching the UX-Conf Suisse 2025, Simon Vogel, CEO of Smile Suisse, got straight to the point. The topic of digital accessibility in question of course corresponds to including all audiences in the technical discussions that govern the creation of digital tools. More specifically, UX-Conf Suisse 2025 chose to focus its attention on the population living with a disability. One in five people in Switzerland is in this situation, according to figures from the Federal Statistical Office. In this perspective, "accessibility is a major issue for all of our customers," explains Yann Cadoret, CEO of UX-Republic. Nathalie Lambert, director of UX-Republic Switzerland, confirms that “digital accessibility is much more than a regulatory obligation. It is a human approach, a commitment to greater inclusion and an opportunity to create truly universal digital experiences.”
Living more independently with digital tools
Enabling millions of people to communicate, work, learn and live more independently with digital tools: this is the ambition carried by digital accessibility. "For companies and organizations, it is also a lever for innovation and a way to strengthen their social responsibility," notes Nathalie Lambert. For Sylvie Podio, first guest of the UX-Conf Suisse 2025 and director for the canton of Vaud of Pro Infirmis, an association that advises, accompanies and supports people with disabilities, talking about digital accessibility for all requires above all a detailed understanding of the multiple realities of disability. But how can we precisely define a disability situation? This results from the interaction between personal factors – such as physical, sensory or cognitive particularities – and environmental factors, which can constitute social or material barriers. According to a recent survey by Pro Infirmis, people with disabilities feel limited in many areas as to their possibilities to act freely, but especially in the professional world. "In this context, IT can be either a facilitating factor or an obstacle," underlines Sylvie Podio.
Setting up participatory workshops
Pro Infirmis is particularly interested in this issue of digital accessibility through its website www.info-handicap.ch which aims to strengthen the capacity for self-determination and promote the autonomy of people affected by disabilities, including those with cognitive impairment. The site designed by Pro Infirmis focuses on simplified navigation or the adoption (as far as possible) of "easy to read and understand" (FALC) language, but excludes the use of a chatbot, a conversational agent that may appear too intrusive for some audiences. In her explanations, Sylvie Podio emphasizes a point that will also be mentioned by other speakers at the UX-Conf: the need, when you want to create a digital tool that is truly accessible to all, to adopt a working method that involves all the people concerned, i.e. all potential users as well as UX experts. Setting up participatory workshops is a possible solution to promote this dynamic. In these workshops, people with disabilities can, for example, clarify why they appreciate a particular feature of a digital platform, why something else remains problematic, etc.
Regulations, standards and legal obligations
Olivier Nourry, a digital accessibility consultant, also continues Sylvie Podio's speech, during the second major intervention of the UX-Conf Suisse 2025, by listing a certain number of good practices to be followed by digital professionals. For him, an accessible digital system must be perceptible, usable and understandable. It must be designed from the outset for people with disabilities, including those using assistive technologies. "Designing a digital tool by integrating the needs of people with disabilities from the very beginning is not only a matter of respecting a human right recognized by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, but also constitutes a major asset: by being inclusive from the outset, a digital device reaches a wider audience and meets the expectations of a diversity of users.
Olivier Nourry also mentions some regulations, standards and legal obligations that exist in this area, for example ISO Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG),Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States (resulting in more than 4000 lawsuits in 2024), the European standard EN 301 549 which specifies the requirements for information and communication technologies to be accessible to people with disabilities, the European directive on digital accessibility of 2016, theEuropean Accessibility Act (EAA) which comes into force in the course of 2025 – companies will have to be ready (any new digital service or product distributed in the European Union will have to comply with the EN 301 549 standard) – or, in Switzerland, the federal law on the elimination of inequalities affecting people with disabilities.
The complexity of modern digital interfaces
Beyond these regulations, standards and legal obligations, the participants of the round table that followed Olivier Nourry's speech at UX-Conf Suisse 2025 wish to show why digital accessibility is an essential, useful and beneficial approach for public or private companies today. Therefore, Lea Gambini-Loffroy, digital experience manager at TAG Heuer, insists on the importance of clear governance on this subject on the part of company management and of continuous training in this area for employees who are digital specialists: designers, developers, testers, content contributors, etc. Tristan Kohler, digital commerce manager for Nestlé Nespresso, “accessibility is essential to ensure an optimal experience for all consumers”. He highlights the complexity of modern digital interfaces and the need to simplify the user experience to improve accessibility. Aziz Orfia, as co-founder of Eyecap', a young Swiss company working on a prototype of a connected swimming cap that allows visually impaired and blind people to swim safely and independently, draws attention to the importance of integrating accessibility into the design of any project. Finally, Julien Conti, accessibility expert for the State of Geneva, deplores the slow pace of awareness-raising initiatives and concrete progress on these issues within administrations and organizations. As a blind person, he experiences on a daily basis the obstacles linked to poorly designed digital tools, making their use particularly difficult for him and for other people with disabilities. At UX-Conf Suisse 2025, he illustrated these challenges through a striking demonstration, exploring a website using very high-speed voice screen reader software and a Braille keyboard. This scenario allowed the public to take stock of the difficulties that are too little known to many digital professionals and of the path that remains to be traveled to make accessibility a greater priority.
The different realities of disability to take into account
To promote accessibility for all audiences, designers of digital tools must take into account the multiple types of disabilities that users may encounter. The impairments of people with disabilities may concern, for example, sight (blindness, low vision, color blindness, reduced visual field, etc.), hearing (total or partial deafness, auditory processing disorder, etc.), motor abilities (paralysis, amputation, musculoskeletal disorders, tremors, etc.), cognitive and intellectual abilities (dyslexia, language, concentration or memory disorders, etc.) or psychological abilities (depression, social anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolarity, phobias, etc.).
What assistive technologies?
Computer and digital assistive technologies for people with disabilities take different forms and range from screen readers, to the possibilities of subtitling and written transcriptions of oral expression, through adapted keyboards, voice assistants, filters applicable to certain content or spell checkers.
Gregory Tesnier, Ph.D., PR journalist (economy, society and culture)
