Design for All feat. Martin Underhill

As part of our ‘Design for All‘ series, we speak with Martin Underhill, a digital accessibility consultant with a background in user experience design and frontend development. Until recently Martin was Accessibility Lead at Sage, a FTSE 100 company where he where he built a thriving accessibility discipline from scratch.

Here he shares how accessibility became central to his career, how he promotes inclusive design at scale, and practical tools that build empathy and capability across teams.

Could you please introduce yourself, what you do, and tell us about your experience?

My name is Martin Underhill and I am a digital accessibility consultant. I help organisations embed accessibility in their teams, products, and processes so it becomes a lasting part of how they work.

I’ve just finished up as Accessibility Lead at Sage, where I spent five years working with about 11,000 colleagues across 23 countries and more than 40 flagship products, as well as internal platforms and digital communications. I led a team of six, spanning auditing, design focused accessibility, code specialists, community engagement, and generalist support.

I started my career as a freelance designer and frontend developer, and I quickly learned to simplify the user interface so I could deliver on time and give clients value; in doing this, I improved the overall user experience. That habit of starting with a minimal viable design before adding complexity led me naturally toward accessibility.

Later, as an interaction designer in UK government, I helped teams meet WCAG 2.1 AA. I worked from accessibility audit reports, coached developers to write more semantic markup, and demonstrated screen reader use. That is where my design and frontend skills came together and set my path in accessibility.

How important is inclusion to your work?

Inclusion sits at the centre of everything I do; accessibility is part of inclusion, but my goal is broader. I want everyone to feel they can engage with accessibility, even when they’re unsure or resistant. The door stays open because inclusive products are in the best interest of every user.

How are you promoting inclusive design through your work and what challenges have you faced?

At Sage, my role was as an internal consultancy across many product teams and disciplines, including design, development, content, QA, product ownership, and project management; that approach informs how I work with clients now.

Because our core team was small we grew a network of Accessibility Champions and a wider community. We ran:

• Monthly Accessibility Guild sessions that anyone can drop into with a coffee.
• Weekly Accessibility Surgeries for hands on help with design or technical issues.
• Global Accessibility Awareness Day activities. This year we hosted a two day internal conference that drew strong engagement.

A recurring challenge is misconception and fear. People often worry about saying the wrong thing or think accessibility is brand new and impossibly complex. My approach has been to focus on a welcoming culture where questions are safe and mistakes are part of the learning process. If someone uses unhelpful language, for example “people suffer from disabilities,” I follow up privately and tactfully and introduce the social model of disability, explaining that people experience barriers created by poor design, not by their impairment. But I also think it is important not to write someone off just because they start from a problematic position.

If we want an inclusive culture in the broadest sense, that means including people we disagree with, even those who might initially be dismissive or ableist. Often, those people are worth talking to the most. You do not change minds by shunning people, you change them through conversation, respect, and showing them real world examples of barriers and solutions. Some of our strongest allies began as sceptics, and seeing that transformation is one of the most rewarding parts of my job.

What are two or three tips you would share with other practitioners trying to promote inclusive design?

1. Reduce fear through engagement. Show that accessibility is achievable and collaborative.
2. Build empathy through experience. Ask people to work with only a keyboard for thirty minutes. Send an email, book a meeting, and notice the barriers. Focus on a few keys: Tab, Enter, Arrow keys, and Space.
3. Embed accessibility across the product lifecycle. Involve all disciplines early and make inclusion routine rather than a late compliance step.

A closer look at Empathy Labs

During my time at Sage, we introduced Empathy Labs to give people a safe and structured way to understand different experiences. Labs included visual impairment goggles, motor impairment gloves, and software based colour vision simulations such as red green colour blindness. These sessions could have been controversial if they trivialise disability, so we were sure to frame them carefully; the purpose was to understand barriers and improve design.

For this year’s GAAD our Champions network ran a day of Empathy Labs across seven or eight offices, including Newcastle, Dublin, London, Manchester, Barcelona, and another office just outside Barcelona. We invested in simulation kit and licenses for all offices. Getting them shipped into Europe, even to Dublin, was surprisingly hard, but worth the effort. Engagement jumps after these sessions and we see membership rise in our channels and groups. Champions can now mobilise labs for next year’s GAAD and for awareness moments such as International Day of Persons with Disabilities and Purple Tuesday.

That experience showed me how powerful empathy exercises can be when they’re framed correctly, and it’s something I now draw on when helping clients build their own awareness activities.

What resources have you found useful to develop your understanding of accessibility and inclusion?

I learn best by doing. I use CodePen to write small HTML examples, then run a screen reader to check whether what I hear matches what I see. Books, articles, talks, and conference sessions are valuable, but hands on learning sticks. An at home empathy lab, even a simple one, helps you build real intuition for barriers and better design choices.

Inclusion is about openness. The more you engage people, through empathy exercises, hands-on testing, or conversation, the more they’ll want to be part of the solution. That’s when accessibility stops being “someone else’s job” and becomes part of the culture; something I’ve seen in government, at Sage, and now in my consultancy work.

Accessible Design Resources
Following the insightful recommendations from our Design For All participants, we’ve curated an extensive collection of tools, guides, articles, books, blogs, and videos. This resource is specifically designed to support accessibility and inclusion specialists at every stage of their journey.

View Accessible Design Resources