Accessibility past compliance, into something that read as care. The first ten minutes of the next ten years.
Most onboardings are a checklist disguised as a welcome. Account, password, terms, consent, profile, recommend. Walk through the same hallway as everyone else and try not to break anything.
The brief on Sky Glass was different. The TV is in your living room, not your inbox. The first ten minutes you spend with it set the tone for the next ten years. We had a chance to design the welcome the way you would design a guest journal at a hotel, not a form at a counter.
Accessibility on consumer hardware is usually treated as a compliance layer. A switch you flip in settings if you remember it exists. We started from the opposite direction. What if the product noticed who you were, and the welcome adapted around that.
We talked to households where one member used a screen reader. Households where a child took the lead on tech. Households with three generations sharing the same room. The same product, asked to do four different things, sometimes in the same evening.
If your sight was low, the entire onboarding flow became visually guided. Audio first, with type sized for actual reading distance from the sofa. Your remote vibrated to confirm. Subtitles defaulted on. The flow widened the moments that mattered and shortened the moments that did not.
The branching was invisible to the household. The product did the work, not the person.
The product had to make people feel known, not accommodated.
Accommodation reads as a workaround. Knowing reads as care. Most of the cost of designing for accessibility is in the language and the choreography, not in the engineering. We treated accessibility as a writing problem first.
For households, we used the TV's own camera the way a host uses a doorway. Not to surveil. To welcome. The system kept families in frame for shared sessions and stepped back when the room emptied. It noticed when one person moved closer to read the screen and quietly increased the type size.
Permission lived in the user's hands at every step. The camera was a feature you turned on because you could see the work it did for you, not a default you had to remember to opt out of.
Behind the accessibility work was a bigger conviction. A television is one of the most-used objects in a home. Most TV product design treats time-spent as the only success metric. We took the question further.
Could the TV know when you were watching too much. Could it suggest, gently, that the family had not eaten yet. Could it understand that wellness in front of a television is not an oxymoron. It is just a brief almost no one writes.
The work asked product design to think like a household. That has stayed with me. Every product I have worked on since gets the same first question.
Not what does the user do. Who is in the room with them, and what is the room asking of this thing right now.
The lesson from the onboarding was that accessibility past compliance is care. The product had to make people feel known, not accommodated. Wellness lives or dies by exactly that distinction.
A product for the body cannot read as a checklist for the body. The onboarding work taught me how to design for the household, not the household head.
The body, like the household, is not a single user. It is a system asking for something specific from the room around it.
That principle is the one I bring to every wellness brief I work on now.