I’ve spent enough time inside the build process of digital products to know the moment accessibility usually gets raised: near the end, as a compliance checklist item, after the design is locked and the deadline is close. In most sectors, that’s a missed opportunity. In digital health, it’s a patient who can’t book their own appointment. 

That’s the gap we’re not talking enough about. As healthcare moves online – telehealth consultations, patient portals, prescription management, test results – digital platforms have quietly become the main entry point to care. And right now, that entry point isn’t accessible for everyone.

96 per cent of digital experiences contain accessibility errors, and nearly 1 in 4 Australians remain digitally excluded, according to the Australian Human Rights Commission. When people can’t reliably use the systems they depend on for their health, accessibility stops being a technical nice-to-have; it becomes a serious health issue. 

Accessibility as a Determinant of Health 

One of the biggest problems I see is that accessibility is still treated as a compliance exercise rather than a design responsibility. In my experience, that mindset is exactly what allows accessibility to be pushed to the end of the development process, when 

many of the decisions that shape the user experience have already been made. In the context of healthcare, this approach falls dangerously short. 

For product teams building digital health technology, accessibility isn’t just about usability, it directly impacts someone’s ability to access care. People have different abilities, circumstances and ways of interacting with technology, and online portals need to be flexible enough to accommodate that. 

This means considering everything from consistent experiences across desktop and mobile devices to compatibility with screen readers and alternative ways to navigate and interact with digital platforms for people with limited mobility. 

I’m particularly concerned with the digital experiences that people need to manage independently, such as booking appointments, accessing results and managing prescriptions. These are deeply personal aspects of healthcare, and being able to access them should not depend on someone else being available to help.

Booking an appointment or accessing your own medical information should be something you can do independently. For me, that’s one of the most important reasons accessibility needs to be considered from the outset: technology should give people greater control over their healthcare, not take it away.

Digital Connection and Mental Wellbeing 

Beyond clinical care, technology is also social infrastructure. For people with chronic illness or limited mobility, digital tools are often the main connection to family and peer support – cut that off, and an inaccessible platform doesn’t just block a task, it disconnects someone from the community that safeguards their wellbeing. 

Simple Design, Significant Impact 

The good news is that improving accessibility does not always require sweeping, costly overhauls. Often, significant gains in accessibility can come down to simple, deliberate choices made early in the development lifecycle. But the bigger shift needs to be in how we think about accessibility. We need to move away from thinking about accessibility as something we build for people with disabilities, and towards thinking about it as something we build into products for everyone’s benefit. 

Some examples include: 

– High colour contrast improves readability for low-vision users and reduces visual strain for all patients. 

– Captions and transcripts ensure deaf or hard-of-hearing users can access video content and support viewing in low-sound environments. 

– Alternative text enables screen readers to communicate important visual information and content to visually impaired users, ensuring important health information is not missed. 

– Keyboard compatibility allows users with motor disabilities or tremors to navigate health platforms without relying on a mouse. 

These may seem like small decisions, but their benefits extend well beyond people with disabilities – captions help in a noisy environment, keyboard navigation helps with a temporary injury, and clear interfaces make healthcare easier to navigate for everyone. 

But guidelines and automated testing can only take us so far. There’s no substitute for hearing directly from the people who experience these barriers. Before launching a digital health product, teams should be asking users with disabilities what they found difficult, what felt intuitive and what they had to work around. 

Ultimately, the question is simple: does the technology adapt to the way you use it, or are you having to adapt to the technology? 

That’s the value of inclusive design. When we design for a broader range of people from the beginning, we create an experience that is more flexible, intuitive and useful.

Building Technology That Actually Adapts 

Australia continues to invest heavily in expanding its digital health infrastructure, but true progress cannot be measured solely by the velocity of technical rollouts or the sheer number of new features deployed. The real metric of success is whether every individual can use these systems confidently, independently, and without unnecessary barriers. 

The technology already exists to make digital health more accessible. The question is whether we build it that way from the start, or wait until a patient hits a wall to find out we didn’t.