Insights

Writing on complex product design.

Articles on product design, UX architecture, design systems, and complex enterprise systems - organized by persona and topic, drawn from real projects.

11 articles

Shomrat Hazorea

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility When the Product Is a Sofa You Can't Touch

Accessibility on a furniture platform has a trap specific to the industry: we sell with sensory richness — in-home video, fabrics, color, a configuration drill-down down to the foam in a pillow. The more immersive that gets, the easier it is to quietly exclude people who can't consume it visually. So our brief wasn't generic WCAG compliance. It was: every visual decision needs a real non-visual equivalent. Swatches need names and state, not just hue. A live results feed that updates silently is invisible to a screen reader. Accessibility is a parallel interaction contract — not a CSS pass at the end. Especially when the product is a sofa you can't touch.

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Enterprise Mobile

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility in the Field Means Gloves, Glare, and One Free Hand

WCAG is the floor for frontline apps, not the ceiling. The real accessibility test is the field: gloves that defeat small tap targets, sunlight that erases low-contrast text, one free hand on a noisy loading dock. Situational and permanent disability collapse into the same requirements out there. Big targets, glare-proof contrast, camera/QR over forms, a single confirming tap. Bonus for R&D: fewer input errors at the source means cleaner data into payroll. Design for the glove and the glare — you'll clear WCAG along the way.

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Menora Insurance

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility in Field-Dense Insurance Flows

Most accessibility talk stops at contrast on landing pages. In insurance, the hard surface is the field-dense internal tool. On Menora's agent zone — many fields, conditional rules, five role lenses — WCAG means keyboard order through multi-axis filters, screen-reader announcements as conditional fields appear, focus that survives constant state changes. That's architecture, not a finishing pass. The deepest a11y debt hides in the internal tools everyone assumes are 'just for power users.'

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Marketing & Campaign Analytics

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility for Data-Dense MarTech Interfaces

Accessibility for analytics products is harder than a WCAG checklist, because the content is data viz — and a chart alone is not accessible to everyone. The fix is architectural: lead with the insight in plain text, let the chart support it. Now the meaning reaches assistive tech and doesn't depend on color. For engineering leaders: if the insight lives in text first, you're accessible by design and compliant as a consequence — not the other way around.

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Hacker U

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility on a Site That Has to Reach Everyone

On an EdTech site, accessibility isn't a compliance checkbox — it's the product promise. The HackerU homepage exists so everyone finds their path: students, graduates, recruiters, discharged soldiers. A site built on 'access for all' can't then lock out keyboard or screen-reader users. I bake WCAG into the design system — semantic structure, focus order that survives the adaptive content card, real table semantics on the dense course page. Designed in, accessibility is cheap. Retrofitted, it taxes every release.

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Government & Public Sector

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

In GovTech, Accessibility Is a Spec, Not a Score

Most teams treat accessibility as a quality bar to clear. In govtech it's a spec with legal teeth — 'mostly accessible' is a failed audit. That changes how you build, not just how you test. Semantic HTML and a real focus model aren't cleanup work; they're the floor a screen reader user stands on. The fancy custom date picker is exactly where public services fail — so I stay conservative, favoring native elements over clever ones. Your users are on assistive tech, old devices, in sunlight, under stress, with low digital literacy — all on the same form. Bake the checks into CI. Make keyboard-only a definition of done. The goal isn't a passing score. It's a service nobody is locked out of.

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Movement

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility in Health Isn't WCAG Theater

In a health product, accessibility isn't WCAG theater. Movement (Ichilov's checkup app) is used by a broad working population — not digital natives, and not always calm when results arrive. So WCAG was the floor, not the goal. The sharpest case: the self-assessment questionnaires, where completion rate is the metric and every accessibility gap is a drop-off. Large tap targets, friendly high-contrast color, icons that support text rather than replace it, and semantic structure so assistive tech announces 'next appointment' as a real unit. For CTOs: health-domain accessibility is a correctness requirement, not a checkbox. An inaccessible questionnaire directly suppresses the metric your clinical workflow depends on.

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Shibolet & Co.

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility With the Gravitas Intact

In a law firm, accessibility isn't a nice-to-have — it's continuous with how the place defines itself: standards, compliance, credibility. Shibolet's hub blended formal notices with warm social content, and WCAG had to hold across both. The real tension: a friendly aesthetic wants soft contrast and flourish; accessibility wants legible contrast, clear focus, clean structure. A community hub that excludes a colleague contradicts the inclusiveness it's selling. Make accessibility the precondition for the warmth — not a layer on top.

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Zammit

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility for a Spatial Configurator That Isn't a Shop-Floor Tool

Accessibility in manufacturing software usually conjures gloves and ruggedized touchscreens. Zammit wasn't a shop-floor tool. Its users were engineers, architects, contractors and retail pros doing procurement on web and mobile. So the accessibility challenge was cognitive and spatial, not environmental. The flagship shelving planner asked people to configure dimensions, shelf count, edge profiles and per-shelf placement — explicitly without CAD knowledge. That means the spatial model has to be legible to someone who's never read a technical drawing, while still respecting WCAG fundamentals: contrast, focus order, input alternatives for a visual UI. Real accessibility here is refusing to gatekeep a complex purchase behind expertise the user never needed.

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Academic & Research Systems

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility in Scientific Tools Goes Beyond WCAG

Accessibility in scientific tools goes past the WCAG checklist. A data viz that encodes meaning only in color fails a colorblind researcher — and everyone in a printout. A virtualized 100k-row table is a screen-reader trap without deliberate focus management. The good news for CTOs: accessible, keyboard-driven, structured access to complex data is exactly what your power users want too. Build it once, serve both.

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Ministry of Defense

Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility Is the Baseline for a Public Institution

On a government portal, accessibility isn't best practice - it's the floor. The Ministry of Defense site is public by definition, so it has to work for every citizen: screen readers, keyboard, high contrast. The trap is that the easy version of 'looks authoritative' - low-contrast greys, motion-heavy reveals - is exactly what fails WCAG and fails real users. I built contrast, focus states and reduced-motion into the component library itself. The most credible interface has to also be the most usable one.

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