Completed Isn’t Accessible: Measuring the Time and Effort Disability Tax

The disability tax includes the extra time and effort disabled customers spend finding controls, repeating steps, or working around barriers, even when they complete a task. We’ll explore three ways to measure this effort: reviewing designs for potential barriers, using AI to find patterns in existing research, and testing directly with disabled participants. Through real examples, I’ll share how teams can use these methods to identify problems, measure improvements, and reduce barriers in their own products. We’ll focus on the time and effort costs of disability rather than financial costs.