Perspective

The Missing Experience

We design and test through our own experience. That experience can reveal barriers — and hide them.

Every person who designs, builds or tests technology brings useful experience to the work.

We also bring blind spots.

A sighted tester can use an interface successfully without discovering what happens when its controls have no accessible names. A screen-reader user can build an interface that works beautifully through speech and focus navigation while visual layout problems remain outside their usual interaction. A neurodivergent tester may notice cognitive friction that colleagues barely register — while missing barriers that their own way of interacting makes invisible.

None of those perspectives is the default.

That is the point.

Accessibility is not a view from nowhere

Accessibility work is sometimes described as though there is a standard user experience and then a collection of accommodations needed by everyone outside it.

Real use is messier. People perceive information differently. They navigate differently. They use different input methods, devices and settings. They process information differently. Their environment changes what they can hear, see or physically do.

A tester cannot personally inhabit all of those experiences. Expertise does not remove that limitation. It should make us more conscious of it.

Different methods reveal different things

Standards identify requirements that should not depend on one person’s intuition. Automated tools can efficiently detect some classes of failure. Manual and assistive-technology testing reveal other behaviours. Usability research and testing with disabled people can reveal barriers the product team did not know to look for.

These methods complement one another. They are not interchangeable.

A clean automated scan does not prove a product is accessible. Passing a success criterion does not prove an interaction is pleasant or understandable. One disabled person’s successful experience does not prove other disabled people will have the same experience.

Lived experience is both insight and perspective

Lived experience can make a tester unusually sensitive to particular forms of friction. That is valuable evidence.

But lived experience is not universal representation. A disabled tester does not become a proxy for every disabled user, just as a non-disabled tester is not a proxy for everybody who does not identify as disabled.

The useful question is not Who understands the user?

It is:

Whose experience is missing from what we have tested?

That question has no permanent answer.

And that is why there is no default user.