Why Social Access Matters: A Conversation with Chris Rourke
What does truly inclusive service design look like in practice?
Ahead of the Service Design Conference Europe 2026, we spoke with Chris Rourke, Executive Director at User Vision, about why organisations need to think beyond accessibility compliance and start designing services around the full customer experience.
In this interview, Chris explores the three dimensions of inclusive and accessible service design: physical access, digital inclusion, and social access. He explains why organisations often succeed in one area while failing in another, and why social access is frequently the missing piece in creating genuinely inclusive services.
Drawing on real-world examples from healthcare, public services, and digital accessibility projects, Chris shares practical insights into accessibility governance, inclusive research, service design processes, and the role of organisational culture in shaping customer experience.
1. Your session highlights three dimensions of accessibility: physical, digital and social. Why is it important for organisations to consider all three together rather than in isolation?
It’s important because each dimension can effectively undo success with the other two.
There’s an example of what happens when just one key fails. A disabled customer researches your venue online, finds a well-designed, accessible website, books a ticket confidently, and travels to your location. When they arrived, the physical building was accessible. However and then encounter a staff member with no awareness of their needs and no way of adapting. The digital journey was seamless. But the experience was a failure. That person won’t come back, and they’ll tell others.
The three dimensions are first the physical accessibility, such as ramps, second the digital accessibility as summarised in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and finally what can be called social access, which occurs at the point of contact with those people delivering the service. Their attitude, awareness, and ability to assist the individual to an appropriate degree can make or break the delivery of accessible services. You can consider it the ‘final mile’ in the end-to-end service delivery, and it’s where services often fail for individuals.
This third dimension of social access is generally unrecognised or, at best, assumed to be ‘fixed’ through simple training but the reality is that it often falls short since lessons from training quickly degrade with time.
The venues, shops and services should not treat the three dimensions as separate tick-boxes, but rather see them as a single, connected experience since that’s how a person with a disability will experience their service.
Service designers are well placed to see this whole system. The challenge is to design for all three dimensions simultaneously, because disabled customers experience them as a single, connected journey.
2. Many organisations still treat accessibility as a compliance exercise. What are the risks of this approach, and how can businesses shift towards a more meaningful, user-centred mindset?
The compliance mindset creates a false finish line. If an organisation achieves a WCAG 2.1 AA audit pass, installs a ramp, and runs a training day on accessibility awareness, they may consider their job done. The reality is that none of those things guarantees a usable, equitable experience for a real disabled person in a real context, as I described in the earlier example.
The risks are substantial. The UK Equality Act requires that organisations proactively remove barriers, not just respond when challenged. The European Accessibility Act, which came into force in June 2025, adds further legal exposure for any organisation trading in the EU. Beyond legal risk, there is potential commercial cost. The spending power of disabled households is estimated at £274 billion annually in the UK alone. Research consistently shows that 75% of disabled customers who encounter barriers simply leave and don’t return. That is not a niche problem.
The shift to a user-centred mindset starts with research. Organisations that have never tested their services with disabled users are often surprised by what they find. Not because they were negligent, but because barriers are often invisible to those who don’t experience them. At User Vision, we often see this when performing usability tests with people with disabilities, for instance, when a client watches a screen reader user go through their checkout flow. That experience can convert more sceptics than any legislation.
3. You mention that WCAG compliance alone does not guarantee usable digital services. Where do organisations typically fall short in practice?
In three areas, consistently.
First, they test with tools rather than people. Automated accessibility checkers are valuable, but they catch roughly 30% of real-world issues at best. The remainder only surfaces when you test with disabled users using their own assistive technology. That could be their screen reader or their voice control software configured the way they actually use it day to day. A page can pass every automated check and still be completely unusable for a real user.
Second, they fail to address accessibility as an ongoing practice. Services degrade. Content gets added by teams who haven’t been trained. Third-party components get updated. What passed an audit 18 months ago may have significant barriers today. We call this ‘accessibility drift’. Organisations should govern accessibility as a continuous responsibility, not a one-off certification.
Third, cognitive accessibility is usually unappreciated or unrecognised. Most accessibility effort goes on technical conformance, such as contrast ratios, alt text and keyboard navigation. But they rarely check the experience of someone with a cognitive impairment, dyslexia, or anxiety navigating a complex multi-step process. Plain language, consistent navigation, clear error recovery, and reduced cognitive load benefit many more people than organisations typically imagine.
4. How can service designers better embed accessibility into their processes from the outset rather than treating it as an afterthought?
The most effective way is relatively simple: include disabled users in research from the very beginning, not as a bolt-on at the end.
Accessibility should start at discovery by ensuring your user research includes people with a range of access needs, that your personas are built on real data from real users rather than assumed from population statistics. From there, accessibility starts being a design input. That changes everything about how teams make decisions downstream.
Beyond that, accessibility should be reflected in the service blueprint. For every touchpoint, the design team should ask three questions: Can a disabled person reach this point? Can they complete the interaction? Will they receive equivalent quality of service when they get here? Those are the three keys, physical, digital, and social, applied at the level of service design practice.
Practically, this means building accessibility criteria in quality checks, including disabled users in your research panels, having assistive technology in your usability testing lab, and a champion for accessibility decisions within the team. Accessibility without ownership tends to drift, but a responsible person can ensure it’s addressed.
5. Can you share an example where improving accessibility delivered measurable business or customer outcomes?
There is a well-documented pattern across a number of the projects we have worked on at User Vision: when organisations invest in testing their digital services with disabled users and acting on the findings, they consistently see improvements in task completion rates and reductions in support contact volumes that benefit all users, not just those with access needs.
The underlying principle is what the accessibility community calls the curb-cut effect. Curb cuts were designed for wheelchair users. They are now used by parents with pushchairs, delivery workers with trolleys, cyclists, and older people — anyone for whom a step is an obstacle. The same dynamic plays out in digital and physical service design. Clearer language benefits users with cognitive impairments, but it also reduces call centre demand across the board. Larger touch targets designed for motor impairments improve mobile usability for everyone. Captions introduced for deaf users are now used by the majority of people watching videos in public spaces.
On the social access side, organisations that have implemented structured pre-visit preparation for disabled customers — ensuring staff are briefed before arrival rather than relying on in-the-moment disclosure — consistently report higher customer satisfaction scores and reduced complaint volumes from disabled customers. The investment in systems pays back in experience quality.
6. Can you share an example where improving accessibility delivered measurable business or customer outcomes?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, User Vision was asked by the NHS to conduct accessibility auditing and usability testing with disabled participants for their COVID-19 Antigen Testing service website, where users could order and register home tests, book drive-through appointments, and contribute to collecting testing results. Timing was critical because the service was being used by the British public on an enormous scale in 2020, and we needed to ensure the site was accessible for all users, including those with disabilities.
We applied several methods, including a manual accessibility audit of the site and testing with 12 participants with various disability types and using their preferred assistive technologies. We identified barriers that could have prevented disabled users from independently booking tests or accessing results, and we worked closely with the NHS development teams to resolve issues quickly. The outcome was a more inclusive and usable service delivered during a national emergency, which helped ensure people with disabilities could be among the hundreds of millions of tests that were processed through the NHS Test and Trace system. It helped to deliver wider access to a vital healthcare service when digital exclusion could have had serious consequences.
Chris Rourke is Executive Director, Industry Engagement at User Vision (uservision.co.uk), a UX, service design and digital accessibility consultancy based in Edinburgh. He will be speaking on The 3 Keys to Inclusive and Accessible Service Design at the Service Design Conference Europe 2026. Find out more below:
