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This is the blog post that accompanies my talk ‘POUR principles and designing with accessibility in mind’. I gave this talk at an LTUX London event in July 2025.

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Accessibility is a tricky area to navigate; there are many grey areas that are open to interpretation and many conditions that must be catered for. The POUR framework can help simplify the process. This post is intended to help you apply this framework to your design in a thoughtful way to create human-centered intuitive products.

Working in the corporate industry has taught me many things, one of the most challenging lessons to learn was how to deal with minimal support and resources. The unfortunate truth is that there are many underfunded or undersold projects; as a design system designer this has never felt more true.

I work in a small design system team (there are four people max, including myself) with an enterprise level design system to build. As there is no option to hire more people, the second best option was to take contribution from non-design system designers. On paper that sounds wonderful, we could have a sort of centralised-federated design system that people lovingly donate their time and components to. Except this was never going to be the reality; what seemed like a “free” resource to the organisation had issues elsewhere:

People can often get enamoured by their own ideas, and it can be challenging as you might be met with defensiveness (should you not agree with them). In my experience this can cause conflict, giving critique and offering feedback is a skill that can be developed. Here are a few things that have helped me not call people’s metaphorical babies ugly.

Focus on something positive#

This can be encouraging, however if it is not genuine then it may come off as patronising and very obvious.