Designing Inclusive EdTech: Making Accessibility a Product Strategy, Not an Afterthought

Can your product claim to be ‘personalised’ if a portion of learners can’t use it at all? Too many teams treat accessibility as a compliance tick-box or a final sprint. For CPOs and product leaders building education products, that approach is a strategic error: accessibility is not a constraint, it’s a multiplier for reach, learning impact and commercial sustainability.

Why accessibility must sit at the heart of product strategy

Accessibility is often framed as legal risk management. That narrow view misses the bigger point: accessible design improves usability for everyone and unlocks markets—older learners, neurodiverse users, people with limited connectivity or devices. Putting accessibility into your product DNA means thinking about outcomes, not just features.

• Outcomes first: define success in terms of learning outcomes for diverse cohorts, not just DAU or retention.
• Market upside: accessible products scale into underserved segments—this matters in Europe, emerging markets and ageing societies.
• Operational efficiency: fixing accessibility late is costly. Embed it early to avoid rework and legal exposure.

Designing inclusive AI: principles and common pitfalls

AI is tempting because it promises personalisation at scale. But when models are trained on narrow datasets, they can amplify bias and exclude learners who don’t match the dominant profile. Product leaders must be deliberate about how AI is used.

Core principles

• Data diversity: collect and validate training data that reflects the full spectrum of learners you aim to serve.
• Explainability: make recommendations and feedback interpretable—learners need to know why a suggestion was made.
• Fallbacks and human-in-the-loop: design graceful fallbacks when the model is uncertain and ensure easy escalation paths to educators or tutors.

Pitfalls to avoid

• Assuming accuracy equals fairness: high overall accuracy can hide poor performance for minority groups.
• Treating adaptive UX as a one-size-fits-all fix: adaptivity must be guided by pedagogy, not only by engagement heuristics.
• Over-optimising for metrics that don’t correlate with learning—time-on-task can be a misleading proxy.

How to operationalise accessibility across product, design and engineering

Making accessibility operational requires changes to ways of working, not just a new checklist. Here are practical levers product leaders can pull.

• Embed the outcomes in discovery: recruit diverse participants for research and map accessibility requirements into job stories and acceptance criteria.
• Autonomous teams with shared standards: empower product trios (product, design, engineering) to own accessibility KPIs and ship incremental improvements.
• Automate and measure: adopt automated accessibility testing in CI, but pair it with manual audits and assistive-technology tests.
• Accessible by default: treat core flows (sign-up, lessons, assessments, feedback) as priority for assistive tech compatibility, captions, readable fonts and low-bandwidth alternatives.

Real-world examples that get it right (and why they matter)

There are practical examples from across the education ecosystem worth studying.

• Duolingo: the company has publicly discussed using large language models to help create personalised lessons and explanations. See their engineering notes on leveraging models for lesson generation and the care they take to keep content pedagogically sound: Duolingo blog on LLMs. Their work is a reminder that AI can accelerate content creation—if teams guard for bias and pedagogical fidelity.
• Microsoft Immersive Reader: a concrete investment in accessibility that improves comprehension for struggling readers and supports multilingual and neurodiverse learners. The product shows how building an assistive layer across apps can raise baseline learning outcomes: Immersive Reader.
• Khan Academy: focuses on mastery learning and clear pedagogy, pairing content with multiple representations (video, text, practice). Their approach emphasises that accessibility is intertwined with instructional design: Khan Academy.

Practical checklist for leaders

Before your next roadmap planning cycle, use this quick checklist to move accessibility from policy into practice.

• Do discovery sessions include users with disabilities and low-resource contexts?
• Are accessibility KPIs part of team OKRs (not just a compliance backlog)?
• Is there automated accessibility testing in CI and regular manual audits with assistive tech?
• Are AI models evaluated on subgroup performance and explainability, not just aggregate metrics?

Putting these in place stops accessibility being ‘someone else’s job’ and makes it central to product success.

Looking ahead: accessibility as competitive advantage

Accessible products are better products. For leaders building the next generation of educational services, accessibility should be viewed as a strategic lever: it expands markets, improves learning outcomes and creates trust. The technical pattern is familiar—embed standards early, empower cross-functional teams, instrument and iterate—but the cultural shift is the harder part. Make accessibility a visible priority, measure it, and reward teams that improve real-world learning for diverse users.

If you’re responsible for a product portfolio, start small: pick a core learner journey, define outcome measures for three diverse cohorts, and iterate for three sprints. You’ll learn faster, ship less irrelevant work and, crucially, serve more learners—because inclusive design is not philanthropy; it’s product strategy.