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At the Interface conference in Quebec City, the program featured plenty of sessions on marketing, design, artificial intelligence and technocreativity. Yet another topic managed to capture the attention of an already busy audience: digital accessibility.
Our Head of Accessibility and Inclusive Design, Cynthia Thibault-Larouche, presented a talk focused on the experience of people who navigate the web using a screen reader. Her goal was simple but ambitious: to help digital teams feel the real obstacles users with disabilities face, and in doing so, change how they design the web.
Interface: Where Technology and Creativity Meet
Interface is a three-day event that brings together professionals from many fields: marketing, design, development, artificial intelligence, communications, technocreativity and, increasingly, accessibility. In this rich, multidisciplinary context, Cynthia came to speak about a topic that too often ends up at the bottom of the priority list in digital projects: including people with functional limitations.
Rather than approaching accessibility only through standards and checklists, she chose an experiential path: showing, letting people hear, and making them live the experience.
Letting People Hear the Web: The Screen Reader Demo
At the heart of her presentation was a live screen reader demonstration. For some people in the room, it wasn’t their first exposure, but the exercise still had a strong impact.
The reactions were telling: “This is so complicated,” “I feel completely overwhelmed.” The speed of the synthetic voice, the density of information, the difficulty of staying oriented—all of it highlighted how disorienting web navigation can be when you rely on your ears instead of your eyes.
Cynthia didn’t stop at showcasing the barriers. She also shared simple, practical solutions teams can implement directly in their digital platforms: properly structuring content, providing strong navigation landmarks, using the right semantic elements, supporting keyboard navigation paths, and more. The idea was for everyone to leave with concrete actions they could apply as soon as they got back to work.
Experiencing Limitations to Design Better
In our conversation, one strong theme emerged: it is very hard to truly put yourself in someone else’s shoes—until you’ve at least tried to live their experience.
At other events, like Off numérique, teams invited participants to try a screen reader themselves, with headphones on. Each time, the same insights surfaced: people realize how cognitively demanding navigation is, they discover alternative navigation paths that are very different from what they usually design, and they grasp that what feels “obvious” in an interface is not obvious at all for everyone.
As Cynthia points out, design biases are normal. It’s not about bad intentions; we design based on our own experience and mental models. That’s why immersive workshops and demonstrations are so valuable: they shift our point of view, open up new perspectives and encourage us to rethink how we build digital platforms.
Accessibility: Still a Hot Topic—and Central to Quality
One of the most striking aspects of this talk was the audience’s enthusiasm. Cynthia describes wrapping up with a line of people waiting to ask questions and go deeper: Where do we start? How do we prioritize? What can we do in a project that’s already underway? How do we train our teams?
In a context where attention often gravitates toward artificial intelligence or the latest design trends, seeing so much interest in screen reader navigation sends a strong message. In 2026, accessibility is no longer a “nice to have”: it is recognized as a core issue of quality, ethics and inclusion.
Resources to Move from Awareness to Action
For those who want to go further, Cynthia suggests two complementary entry points:
- Read our ebook on the accessibility lifecycle, outlining the key stages to consider in a project: from initial planning through to maintenance, including design, development and testing. For people who don’t know where to begin, it’s a solid starting guide.
- Explore our catalogue of accessibility training options that can be tailored to the specific needs of different teams: UX designers, developers, product managers, content specialists and more. The goal is to make accessibility concrete and actionable for every role.
These resources extend the experience of Interface and provide a framework for turning awareness into lasting change within organizations.
Toward More Inclusive Digital Platforms
What emerges from this conversation is the importance of bringing together three dimensions: understanding the issues intellectually, experiencing limitations first-hand, and taking concrete action in real projects.
By letting participants “hear” the web and symbolically placing them on the other side of the screen, Cynthia and Karine highlight a simple truth: designing for everyone requires stepping outside ourselves. Accessibility isn’t just about ticking compliance boxes; it’s about adopting a new way of thinking about navigation, information and user experience.
If, in the future, every tech conference made room not only to look at the web but also to listen to it, our digital platforms would, little by little, become fairer, more human and truly accessible to all.