DeafBlind Awareness Week – Interview with specialist, Molly Watt
As part of Deafblind Awareness Week, we’re highlighting the importance of designing services that are accessible to everyone, regardless of how they experience the world. To mark the occasion, we spoke with Molly Watt, who brings both lived experience and specialist expertise in deafblind accessibility and inclusive design to our new Introduction to Accessibility course. Molly has worked with organisations across financial services and beyond, helping teams understand the real-world impact of inaccessible products and showing how thoughtful, inclusive design can make services more usable for all.
In this interview, she reflects on the inspiration behind the course, the value of embedding lived experience into accessibility training, and what firms can gain from taking part. She also shares advice for organisations at the start of their accessibility journey, and what meaningful, long-term inclusion really looks like in practice.
What was the inspiration behind your Accessibility training course, currently being delivered for TISA members?
Whichever way we turn, there is always an opportunity to learn. In recent years I’m no longer frustrated by people being unaware. People don’t know what they don’t know. When it comes to disability and understanding inclusion, it’s no different.
For me, it’s about helping change perspectives, widening people’s thinking and making room for learning and development. This applies to anyone and everyone. We are all part of the same society and can all contribute to more inclusive attitudes.
With the European Accessibility Act now marking a year since it came into effect, there’s a growing need for organisations to better understand what accessibility means in practice. Not just from a compliance point of view, but from a customer point of view as well. It’s about going beyond compliance and thinking about what a genuinely inclusive customer experience looks like.
It’s refreshing to see lived experiences being used in such an important training topic, can you tell us a bit more about this.
Lived experience will always be important for people wanting to better understand their users. It’s also important to recognise that not everyone’s lived experience is the same, and that each one is valid.
Hearing directly from people about what those experiences actually look like helps ensure products and services are designed in ways people may not have considered before. It helps move thinking beyond checklists and encourages people to keep challenging their own awareness by staying connected to real experiences.
What would you say to someone who may be considering this course?
Anyone and everyone will benefit from this course. It brings together awareness, assistive technologies in practice, and what accessibility looks like from a user perspective.
It also gives simple, practical things to think about when you want to be more inclusive, and that can apply across all roles, including within financial services and customer-facing teams.
Any final words of advice for firms that are currently looking at accessibility and inclusion when it comes to product design and their own offering?
Start somewhere. Don’t worry too much about where you start. Just by starting, you will have already made more of a difference to your users than you might think.
Accessibility is a journey. Once you’re on it, it’s about keeping yourself informed, caring about people’s experiences, and committing to keeping an open mind. With expectations like the European Accessibility Act continuing to shape the landscape, starting early and thinking beyond compliance really matters.
A MESSAGE FROM TISA
Reflecting and drawing insights from lived experience is fundamentally important to TISA’s Vulnerable Customers Working Group. We aim to spotlight lived experience and charities at every meeting and build insights into our best practice guide. Bringing these insights into an inclusive design approach also underpins TISA’s work on disclosures and targeted support. Helping TISA members reach consumers where they are, and making both products and services more accessible is central to our mission of improving consumer financial wellbeing. We encourage TISA members, including UX, product and service design colleagues to consider this training.