Design and accessibility – with Ludovic Evelin
A conversation between designers about accessibility, social impact, and the next generation
Ludovic is the second designer I’ve invited for an interview, and also someone I see as an ally. It’s a chance to hear in his own words what it means to be an accessibility designer outside of big corporations, and the impact this work can have on our profession and on society.
During our conversation, Ludovic spoke about his disability and how it shapes his daily life, his journey as a designer committed to digital accessibility, and his role as a teacher with new generations of creatives. Three sides of the same commitment, guided by the aim of making design fairer and more inclusive.
Living with spina bifida
Can you tell me about your disability?
I was born with a congenital condition called spina bifida which is a neurological disorder. In my case, I had a myelomeningocele – a hernia in the lower back where cerebrospinal fluid was leaking. I had surgery at birth, but the outlook for walking was poor, or at best delayed. In the 1980s, my parents had no choice but to enrol me in a private school. Until the French law of 11 February 2005, children with disabilities were not always allowed in state schools – it depended on the school.
I was in a pushchair until the age of three. What motivated me was watching my classmates walk at school. Eventually, I managed to walk almost normally.
At 20, after a failed operation, I had to start using crutches. I’ve never used a wheelchair, but I’ve had many operations to ‘correct’ both functional and aesthetic issues.
Spina bifida brings many challenges: long-term effects such as malformations of the lower limbs, but also urological complications and chronic pain. Standing for long periods is hard, but so is sitting too long because of the risk of pressure sores. And there’s another aspect people talk about less: cognitive effects.
How does spina bifida affect your cognitive abilities?
For some people with spina bifida, cerebrospinal fluid can build up inside the skull, compressing the brain and causing damage of varying severity. In my case, pressure in my mother's womb caused mild brain damage, but my parents were never given clear explanations.
There was the visible physical disability, but also other signs: difficulties with attention at school, behaviours that might have raised questions. My parents reassured themselves because I was doing well academically, so they thought there was no issue. Meanwhile, I developed my own coping strategies, unnoticed.
Looking back, what stands out most is how I documented everything. From an early age, I wrote down what I did, how I did it, and with whom. And I still do today.
The biggest challenge for me is prospective memory: planning and remembering upcoming tasks. That’s really difficult. So I have sticky notes everywhere – I’m like Mr Sticky Notes! I also use timers to stay focused. These are strategies I developed over time, and I think I’ve become quite good at managing things.
It was only when I began long-term therapy that all this came to light. I finally had explanations. I don’t usually talk about the cognitive effects of my disability. People who’ve worked with me for years have noticed, but nobody has ever made an issue of it.
There are still awkward situations, like forgetting someone’s name, or even their face. I can meet someone and not remember who they are. I may come across as snobbish, when in fact I know them well – sometimes it’s a student I’ve taught for a year. I can remember exactly what they do, but their name slips my mind. It’s unsettling. So I often say: “Oh, names and I don’t get along…” I make light of it.
Is your condition still evolving?
It’s not a degenerative disease, but it is a body affected by multiple disabilities that is also getting older. Over the past few years, I’ve lost a lot of mobility. Using crutches has become painful. So the decision has been made: I’ll be using a wheelchair from January 2026. I’m already adapting my house for it.
I now avoid some activities because I know I can’t manage long distances on foot – like going shopping in the city centre, or even doing the groceries. It’s too hard.
Have you looked into alternatives such as an exoskeleton?
Yes. A few months ago, I saw a video on social media by someone named Roro le costaud. He does a lot of work raising awareness about accessibility. He’s a former firefighter who had an accident and is now paraplegic. In one of his posts, he tested an exoskeleton.
I thought it was amazing. I told myself: ‘Ludo, you should look into exoskeletons.’ That’s how I discovered the company REEV, which invites people with certain conditions to apply for clinical trials of their devices. So I applied! I thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to walk without crutches – with my hands free?’ or at least imagine that possibility.
Months later, they got back to me asking me for more details about my condition. In the end, I was told that my case didn’t quite fit their current trials, but they said they’d keep me in mind for future prototypes.
For me, this opens up real possibilities. Yes, I’ll have to start using a wheelchair because my body needs it. But I still have some mobility: I can get up, sit down. So I imagine a device that could support my legs, help me stand, hold me upright, or even walk with me. It may sound like a dream for now, but I see it more as a promise – that future innovations will make these solutions available.
I’m also keeping an eye on what’s being developed in the US, where several robotics labs are working on this. And I should mention someone else I follow on social media: Monsieur Handi, who also has spina bifida. A few months ago, he trekked to Everest Base Camp at 5,500 metres (18,000 feet). He can walk with crutches but uses a wheelchair as well. He’s a huge inspiration to me. Some people both use a wheelchair and walk.
It’s interesting that you mention inspiration, because I often hear criticism around inspiration porn. What do you think about that?
That’s a tricky one. We all struggle to allow ourselves to dream, to believe something is possible, to take the leap. When I see someone in a situation similar to mine who has given themselves permission to try, and it works out, it gives me the push to do the same.
Sometimes I tell myself: ‘No, Ludo, you have to give yourself permission on your own…’ But seeing others do it helps me believe I can as well.
There’s a lot of debate about inspiration porn, and I don’t want to get caught up in it because it stirs up so much controversy. Every athlete or public figure experiences this in their own way.
In France, the only politician who uses a wheelchair is Sébastien Peytavie. I follow what he does. Whether or not I agree with his political ideas, I find him deeply inspiring because he’s a true advocate for accessibility. He carries the weight of many social issues linked to disability. To be honest, he almost made me want to go into politics!
Is ableism an important issue for you?
I wouldn’t call myself an activist – or maybe I’ve become one. I’ve experienced very uncomfortable situations of ableism, and they really get under my skin.
A few years ago, I was working with someone who brought me business opportunities. One of his potential clients invited us to talk about a website project. But the meeting felt strange. My business contact, who’s also a friend, did most of the talking with the client, and I joined in from time to time. Yet I could feel I wasn’t really included in the conversation.
At one point, I added something about the artistic direction, and the client stopped, turned to my friend, and asked: ‘Is what he’s saying true?’
I was stunned. I didn’t understand what was happening. But it became clear that this person saw me as someone with both physical and intellectual impairments.
At the end, the client told my friend: ‘I’m happy to work with you, but there’s no way the other disabled guy will be on the project.’ My friend replied: ‘If you don’t want to work with Ludo, fine. But in that case, I won’t work with you either.’
Nothing changed — the client didn’t reconsider, and we lost a major project. But neither of us regretted that choice.
Becoming an accessibility designer
How did you first come across the world of digital accessibility?
About 20 years ago, I was working one August for an association of young farmers in the French countryside. I was designing certificates for prizes like best livestock, best meat, and so on. But I got sick and needed to see a doctor in the village.
His sign said ‘general practitioner’ and just underneath, ‘equestrian doctor – horse specialist’. I didn’t really understand, but I went in. The waiting room was actually his kitchen, with two or three people already waiting.
I’m not usually very sociable, but for some reason we all started talking. We quickly realised we had things in common. One of them was also from Tours where I live. I said I made websites, and one of the two replied: ‘We’re computer engineers, but with one difference: we’re blind.’
I hadn’t noticed, but they were blind twins, and as it happened, they were from Joué-lès-Tours, right next to where I lived.
Straight away, I started asking questions: ‘How do you do it? How does it work?’ They invited me to come and see for myself. Naturally, the first thing I did was ask them to browse the websites I had built. And it was a huge shock: they couldn’t use them at all.
That was my first encounter with people with visual impairments — something I had been completely unaware of. No one had ever mentioned it during my training. That day, I realised how profoundly unfair it was, and that I was responsible for that unfairness.
How did you start integrating accessibility into your design practice?
In 2005, accessibility was still in its early days. I decided to build my business around disability, with one rule: every website I created had to be accessible. No exceptions. Which meant I had to learn.
I drew inspiration from many people, including Monique Brunel, who had started a blog on digital accessibility. I read widely and taught myself.
Later, I began teaching at Cefim, a school in Tours. That’s where I met Benoist Lawniczak. It was a real meeting of minds: two people who had each been working on accessibility on their own. We ended up teaching the same course, and together we redesigned it around quality and digital accessibility.
What projects and challenges are you facing today in accessibility?
I definitely want to keep building websites — that’s for sure. I also want to continue developing innovative tools for different contexts, especially for one of my clients, the Terres du Son festival.
This is a bit of a secret, but I’ll share it anyway: I’ve had my eye on another festival for a long time — Hellfest. I’d love to work on their digital products.
Terres du Son uses a scheduling app developed by a third-party company, the same one used by many festivals in France, including Les Vieilles Charrues. The app is embedded on the site in an iframe. But when you run an accessibility audit, it’s very difficult to access the content — the headings, images, and all the programming details.
Because it’s an external tool, it can’t properly be included in the audit. And I have no guarantee that it’s accessible to everyone. When we raised the question with the festival team, we realised it had never occurred to them. That’s not surprising in itself, but it means most major festivals in France don’t realise their apps aren’t accessible.
At Terres du Son, they decided to keep paying for the app but not use the embedded version. Instead, we fill in the content twice: once in the app, and again on the website. They do this because they genuinely care about accessibility, both physical and digital, and they’re sincerely working to make things fairer. To me, they’re true advocates of inclusion. They never once questioned my recommendations, even though they’re a small association with limited resources. They trusted me, and that’s precious.
How do you include accessibility in your service offering?
This may sound strange, but none of my clients has ever paid for accessibility. From the start, I’ve been committed to universal accessibility, and I made it my rule: clients don’t pay for it.
Where I do need to convince them is when they ask for a “wow effect” on their site with a certain technology. If I don’t have an accessible alternative to offer, I explain why. And if the client insists on that effect, I simply tell them I’m not the right person for the job and refer them to someone else. You can see why I don’t make a lot of money! I know how to create those flashy features, but they go against the principles I set when I founded my first company.
Later, when I co-founded my second company, Sans Format, we agreed we didn’t want to fall into the dogma of pure aesthetics or marketing at the expense of our values: eco-design, accessibility, and humanity.
Luckily, teaching helps me here: it makes it easier to persuade people.
Can you share an example where you had to take an educational approach with a client?
I work with a multi-sport club, an association not very familiar with accessibility issues. I share a lot with them, and they find it really interesting. On their homepage, for instance, text and images appear and disappear. I told them: ‘I’ll create this animation, but I’ll also add a stop button.’ They said: ‘Why add a stop button? It’s ugly!’
So I explained that the button would be discreet, and more importantly, that for people with cognitive or attention challenges, it’s essential to be able to stop an animation. Then they started sharing personal stories about disability in their own families. That’s when they realised accessibility affects everyone, in one way or another.
I've also been working with lawyers since 2007, they were the first to put their trust in me. They wanted a logo, a visual identity, a website. At the time, accessibility wasn’t on their radar at all. But I told them: ‘If your site is accessible, it’ll also rank well in search engines.’ That convinced them straight away!
I’ve been working with them ever since — almost 20 years. Today, they’re proud to say: ‘Our website is fully accessible.’ And it matters all the more because some of their clients are disabled. Their site is still accessible today. Design trends may change, but the structure remains.
What do you see as the limits of our work as accessibility designers?
One myth that persists is the idea of ‘one-shot accessibility’ — the belief that user testing with disabled people can wait until later, once the site is live, or worse, that it’s not needed at all. Users are left out of the design process, and the result is one-shot accessibility: a single audit, maybe a few quick fixes, and nothing more.
Another problem is what happens once a website is live. Who manages the content and updates? Have those people been trained in accessibility? If not, then accessibility ends at launch. That’s what I mean by one-shot accessibility: a site that is technically accessible at delivery, but not maintained that way in the long run.
That’s why I always make sure my clients know how to update their sites. For small organisations, I even do it for free. They need at least a basic understanding of accessibility, and I see that as my responsibility.
Teaching and inspiring the next generation
Why is your role as a teacher so important to you?
Through teaching, I thought: ‘Ludo, you have the chance to create little ambassadors of accessibility, to spread this knowledge and change lives.’ Even though jobs in our field are harder to find these days, every year I still see students finishing the course and landing contracts. It happened again this year. Despite the tough economic climate, they make it.
But sometimes I can’t help worrying about them. I’m afraid that once they’re in the field, they won’t be valued properly, won’t be given what they need to thrive, or won’t have their expertise in accessibility and interface design recognised. I want them to work in environments that genuinely respect them, without constantly having to prove their worth.
I don’t know if you saw it, but I made a LinkedIn post the other day about justified text, and I got a flood of criticism. I think it’s worth talking about. Strictly speaking, the French accessibility standard (RGAA) doesn’t prohibit justified text. It’s only mentioned in the WCAG at level AAA.
What I questioned was the relationship between justified text and using 200% zoom. The wider the gaps between words, the harder it becomes to read, especially when zooming. That clearly has an impact.
Under my post, people told me: ‘That’s not how it’s written in the RGAA, so don’t mislead people.’ And yes, I agree it doesn’t block reading. But it does affect intelligibility. And I don’t necessarily speak to experts. I speak to ordinary people, and my aim is to make accessibility approachable so everyone can own it.
When people attack me for trying to make the subject accessible, it gives others permission to send me similar messages. And sometimes these are people I respect as experts, whose work I’ve admired for years. But I see how quickly some accessibility experts in France criticise newcomers. I’m not that young anymore, but as soon as I started speaking up about accessibility, I became a target.
I don’t really understand why. Do they think I’m competing with them? Honestly, it really shook me. I had to remind myself: ‘Ludo, why are you doing this? Why have you fought for universal accessibility all these years?’ It’s because I believe it’s right — it’s the fight of my life. And then I come across these people, who I thought shared the same values, but in the end… not really.
I think of Ronald Mace, who developed the seven principles of universal design. Principle five is tolerance for error — recognising that users will not always use a product the way we imagined. I wish more people would apply that principle. And it’s one of the hardest things to teach my students. I teach them design values, but also how to behave as designers.
They usually just accept what I tell them. But sometimes one student pushes back: ‘Why should I believe you, Ludo? Why should I listen to you? Why is your way the right way?’ I love that. Because it gives me the chance to bounce back, to encourage them to question things. That’s the right attitude — it drives them to dig deeper and explore further.
How do you spark your students’ interest in accessibility?
Benoist Lawniczak once recommended a Datagueule video, which is a bit old now but I still use it at the start of my accessibility module. In it, Anne-Sarah Kertudo explains that disability doesn’t come from the body. She says something powerful: disability comes from outside the person.
This helps me lead students towards the idea of universal accessibility and the social model of disability. And they get it straight away. Once they’ve had that lightbulb moment, they accept the rigour of our teaching on web quality and accessibility much more easily.
One year, I skipped the video. I had just begun my introduction when a student interrupted: ‘Ludo, you’re talking about accessibility, all this effort and everything… but is it really worth it for just a few people?’
I asked: ‘What do you mean by a few people?’ She replied: ‘If it’s only for two or three people, it’s not worth it.’
My heart was racing, I turned bright red. I tried to argue, but I could see she wasn’t convinced. At lunch, I gathered statistics. After lunch, I came back with the numbers. And she said: ‘Okay, now I understand.’
Since then, I update that table every year so I’m never caught off guard again.
Do you also have students with disabilities?
Yes, though sometimes I only find out once the course has begun. One year, I had a student who had suffered a stroke and was living with speech and cognitive difficulties.
As usual, I began the year with a round of introductions where everyone presents themselves. When it was her turn, I saw her struggling to speak, then breaking down in tears. She cried uncontrollably, and I had no idea what was happening until her neighbour whispered to me: ‘She has difficulty speaking. She won’t be able to introduce herself.’
At that point, I could step in and reassure her. I suggested she write her introduction, send it to me, and that we would get to know each other another way. She was only just discovering life with a disability. My role that year was to show her that it wasn’t up to her to adapt to us — it was up to us to adapt to her. It was our job to make things accessible.
Since then, I’ve made a promise: at the start of every course, I ask if anyone would prefer not to introduce themselves. All they have to do is raise their hand. It’s now a standard part of my practice.
Do you have any advice for students with disabilities?
Funny you'd ask — I had written: ‘My advice?’ For me, it’s clear: it’s not up to them to adapt to the system — it’s up to the system to adapt to them.
They shouldn’t be afraid to speak up, to claim their place — because they have every right to be there. They don’t have to prove themselves. What matters is that their needs are respected. That’s the most important thing.
It took me a long time to understand that myself. I have a disability, I have physical and cognitive needs. And those are normal needs. My environment should accommodate them. It took me a long time to accept that, but I know others need to hear it too.
When you say this out loud to people in that position, whether it’s new to them or not, it unlocks something.
What do you think needs to change in our industry?
I think we need to stop designing in isolation. Clients often see design only through the lens of aesthetics and visual value. That’s what I always tell my students, who rush straight into what I call the ‘pretty-pretty’. Design first. Make it pretty afterwards. I’ve really drilled that into them.
They’re trained to think conceptually, to ask the right questions. But once they arrive in companies, the reality is different. No sticky notes, no personas on the wall. I’d like us to move beyond a vision of design reduced to aesthetics or tools, and return to what matters: design and the user.
I know that’s more of a dream, an ideology. But I want to put social responsibility, ecology, accessibility, ethics, and human impact at the centre of our work. To me, that’s the designer’s role: to question what we choose to highlight, and to consider the consequences of those choices.
If I could do only one thing as a UX designer for you, what would it be?
That’s a hard question, because I can’t give just one answer. But if I had to, I’d ask you to give me my own space to express myself — with my cognitive challenges, my disability, my differences, my limitations. I’d ask you to include me in the whole design process, from start to finish.
That’s also what I ask of my students: always include an inclusive persona — one that really matters to them, one they’ll remember for their entire career as designers. Because that way, they get used to including people who face barriers, people who aren’t like them.
So what I’d say is: don’t imagine things for me, imagine them with me. Companies should hire more disabled people into their design teams, if only to bring different life experiences into the mix.
In a design team, you need to use tools like Figma, which has become essential — and yet it’s still inaccessible. The fact that so little effort is made to change this is a real problem. Figma holds a dominant position, and sometimes acts like it’s above it all. And that’s where it becomes ableism: designing for users, rather than designing with them.
