Designing for Markus. Why a single user inspired a global UI change.

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) has done an excellent job positioning itself as being a leader in the world of accessibility, and it now has over 10,000 global members.

The IAAP is a member organisation that requires paid membership, but it often runs free events and webinars in its pursuit to increase inclusion through professional education and certification.

I recently attended one of these events: IAAP EU & Vially Hybrid Event 2026 virtually. Despite the distance, one speaker in particular inspired me into action. Markus Kämäräinen is a Doctoral Researcher at Tampere University in Finland. He is quadriplegic and has limited mobility, with use of only his left arm and cannot use his fingers.

When he uses a desktop PC he uses a mouth-operated device or a [specialised] mouse as he cannot use regular devices; however, his preference is to use an iPad for everything as it has a relatively large touchscreen.

When asked what are the challenges of using digital services, Markus revealed that as he only has use of his left hand that he found it difficult to interact with most websites as their UIs are typically designed for right-handed people.

Listen for yourself. Watch these two minutes that stopped me in my tracks in the IAAP Session 9: End user focus (10m 36s).

It’s true. Even the Kindera website was biased to right-hand users, so I did something about it.

Most efforts, when it comes to digital accessibility, are invisible to most users but vitally important for those that rely on assistive technology. However, there is another truth I believe in, and that is providing options.

Now, I think this is a good example of acknowledging that you can’t get everything right when it comes to digital accessibility. That’s why it is so important to continue to learn and make improvements when you can.

For Markus, I realised that a layout switch would potentially improve things for him. 

This is not an accessibility widget

Choice is really important and that is why we include an options menu on our website. It allows users to change the appearance of our website to suit their preferences. Users can enable dark mode colour theme and change the font to use Lexend (a font designed for increased readability). Thanks to Markus, it is now possible to switch the layout so the navigation elements appear on the left or right side of the page.

This is the default layout for the header…

Clicking the options menu (cog icon) presents these options…

Changing the navigation position to the left, flips the layout…

This makes the menu items more reachable and it also affects the layout of the menu items that appear in the modal…

The importance of one person

The reality is that this change does not make my website more conformant (against WCAG’s success criteria), it simply makes it more inclusive.

I will acknowledge that introducing this enhancement took effort, time and money. I will also acknowledge that it may only ever be useful for one person, Markus, who may never visit my website. However, if he did (or anyone else) then I want him to have the best experience possible.

In my opinion, this is what digital accessibility is about:

1. Understanding that there is no such thing as '100% accessible’.
2. Fix issues when you become aware of them or you gain new knowledge.
3. Acknowledging that even if it is just one person, then implementing changes matters.

Reflecting on the effort it took to add this functionality, it again highlights the reasoning behind the shift left principle. With greater awareness of different types of disabilities, user research and intentional design we can build features like this from the offset. And when you only discover a need at a later date, find a reason to implement the changes — even if that reason is called Markus.