Last spring I watched a workshop fall apart in the first twelve minutes. The room was a borrowed meeting space on the second floor, the lift was out of order, and two participants who use wheelchairs were still in the lobby. The sticky notes were up. The agenda was printed. The facilitator had a slide deck nobody could read from the back. What broke the session wasn't the broken lift, exactly — it was that nobody had checked it the day before.
That afternoon is why I now treat accessible co-design workshops for disabled participants as a logistics problem before it is a design problem. The methods matter. The values matter. But a co-design session that people cannot physically get into, read, hear, or stay present in produces exactly nothing, no matter how inclusive your intentions were when you booked the room.
Key Takeaways
- Accessibility has to be designed into the session plan, not retrofitted after someone complains.
- Budget roughly twice the usual time per activity if you are running a mixed group where some participants use interpreters, screen readers, or need processing pauses.
- Send materials in at least two formats ahead of time — never one PDF and a hope.
- Pay disabled participants for their time. This is the single cheapest credibility move available to you.
- Keep the group small. Eight to ten people is the ceiling before the room stops being manageable for anyone with sensory or cognitive access needs.
- Ask about access needs at registration, not on the day.
Why accessible co-design workshops fail at the door
Most co-design failures I have seen are not conceptual. They are physical and temporal. The invitation goes out, people say yes, and then the practical details quietly exclude half the room.
Here's the thing: accessibility is rarely one big barrier. It is a stack of small frictions that each look survivable on their own and become unsurvivable together. A venue with a step. A registration form that only accepts one format. A two-hour block with no break. A facilitator who talks fast. A slide with grey text on white. None of these sink a session alone. All of them do.
The five defaults that exclude people
When I audited my own early sessions — this was a few years back, when I thought "we have a ramp" counted as accessible — I found the same five blind spots every time:
- Venue chosen before access needs were known. The room got booked, then we asked who was coming. Wrong order.
- One communication channel. Verbal discussion only, no written alternative, no interpretation, no captioning.
- Activities that assume hands and eyes. Sticky notes on a wall, whiteboard sketching, "walk around the room and find your pair."
- No rest structure. Ninety minutes straight, because that is what a standard workshop block looks like.
- Materials sent as a single locked PDF. Screen-reader hostile, unreadable on a phone, impossible to annotate.
Each one is fixable in under an hour of preparation. The trouble is that none of them announce themselves as problems until someone is already in the room and unable to participate.
What a reproducible session actually looks like
This is where most published guidance on inclusive co-design stays vague. You get principles — "value lived experience," "work respectfully" — and no schedule. So here is a schedule. Adapt it, but adapt the structure rather than throwing it out.
Before the session
Two weeks out, send a short registration form that asks three things in plain language: what format you would like materials in, whether you need an interpreter or captioner, and whether there is anything about the room or the timing that would make the session hard. Do not make this a free-text box labelled "accessibility requirements" with no guidance — people should not have to disclose a diagnosis to get a ramp.
Book the venue only after you have those answers. Confirm the lift works, the accessible toilet is unlocked, and the entrance is step-free on the day, not just according to a website. I now ask the venue to send a photo of the entrance. Sounds excessive. It has saved me twice.
Session structure that holds up
The structure I have landed on after a lot of trial and error:
- Arrival buffer, 20 minutes. Not "start at 10:00 sharp." People arrive at different speeds. Coffee, name labels in large print, and a facilitator at the door.
- Ground rules, 10 minutes. Spoken and written. Include "you can leave at any point, no explanation needed" and mean it.
- Two work blocks of 35 minutes, separated by a 15-minute break. The break is not optional and not shortened because you are running behind.
- Multiple output channels in every activity. Verbal contribution, written notes, drawing, or one-to-one conversation with a facilitator who writes it down. Whichever the participant prefers.
- Close with a check-out round. One sentence each: what worked, what didn't. It is the most useful data you will collect all day.
One observation from running this format repeatedly: the check-out round consistently surfaces access problems I did not spot. On one project, three separate participants mentioned that the background music in the venue made it hard to follow conversation. I had not registered the music at all. It was off for every subsequent session.
Remote and hybrid: useful, but not automatically more accessible
There is an assumption that moving a co-design workshop online removes access barriers. It removes some and adds others. Travel and venue problems disappear. Cognitive load from video calls, unstable connections, and platform interfaces that screen readers handle badly all appear.
What works, in my experience:
- Run a short technical check with every participant the day before. Ten minutes, one-to-one.
- Use live captioning, not just auto-captions. The gap in quality is large.
- Share the exact agenda with timestamps in advance so people can plan their energy.
- Record the session and share it, so nobody has to be present for the whole thing to contribute.
- Offer a written follow-up channel for anyone who found the live format too much.
The catch? Hybrid sessions where some people are in a room and others are on a screen tend to favour whoever is physically present. Side conversations happen. The remote participants get a worse experience. If you can, run fully remote or fully in-person — the mixed format is the hardest to get right.
Accessibility formats compared
The table below is what I hand to organisers who ask me where to start. It is not exhaustive, but it covers the decisions that come up most often.
| Format | Good for | Main limitation | Preparation time |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-person, small group | Deep discussion, relationship building | Venue access, travel burden | High — venue vetting takes real effort |
| Fully remote with captioning | People with mobility or travel constraints | Platform accessibility, fatigue | Medium — technical checks essential |
| Hybrid | Mixed groups with a strong facilitator | Remote participants get sidelined | Very high — two facilitation roles needed |
| Asynchronous written | People who need processing time | Loses the energy of live discussion | Low, but needs active moderation |
My honest view: asynchronous written formats are underrated for co-design with disabled participants. They let people contribute at their own pace, with their own tools, on their own schedule. I ran one over three weeks with a group of eight and got richer input than from any two-hour session I have ever facilitated. It is slower. It is also better.
The parts nobody writes about
Payment. If you are asking disabled participants to give you their lived experience so your product can be better, pay them. Not a voucher. Not "refreshments provided." A fee, the same as you would pay any consultant. When I first started this work I did not budget for it, and I am still slightly embarrassed about that. Now it is the first line in the budget.
Then there is the facilitation question — specifically, whether the facilitator should be disabled. Not always. But a non-disabled facilitator needs to be genuinely comfortable saying "I don't know how to do this, tell me what you need" in the room, in front of everyone. That is harder than it sounds, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's afternoon.
Finally: co-design means the participants' input changes the outcome. If you run the workshop and then build what you had already planned, you have not done co-design. You have done consultation with extra steps. People notice.
The session that fell apart last spring? We reran it four weeks later in a ground-floor room with a working lift, eleven days' notice to participants, and paid fees. Twelve people came. The ideas that came out of that second session shaped the product more than any internal design review I have been in since.
What I keep coming back to is that accessibility is not a checklist you complete. It is the thing you plan around from the first email. Get that order right and the design work gets better almost by itself.
