Welcome back to Healthy Innovations! 👋

This Thursday, May 21, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day – the 15th annual GAAD. Its purpose is simple: get everyone talking, thinking, and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than one billion people worldwide living with a disability or impairment.

Most of us take for granted picking up and using our digital devices to send messages, make calls, and access information related to our healthcare needs. But that is not everyone's reality, so this week's deep dive asks the question: why has digital health, a sector built to expand access to care, so often failed the people who need it most?

Let’s take a look.

Molly Watt was born with significant hearing loss. By her mid-teens, she had also been registered legally blind. The condition is called Usher Syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes progressive vision loss alongside hearing impairment, with no cure and no warning of how fast it will move. Molly navigated childhood and adolescence with hearing aids, speech therapy, a rotating cast of specialists, and the kind of institutional resilience that people with complex conditions learn early.

What she did not expect was that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), the system built to care for her, would repeatedly behave as though her disability simply hadn't been updated in its records.

Her audiologist, fully informed of Molly's deaf-blindness diagnosis, continued using hand gestures Molly couldn't see. She was taken into bright rooms that worsened her remaining vision. Test results arrived in size 10 font on white paper, accompanied by tiny graphs: entirely inaccessible to someone with her level of sight loss. When she needed to order replacement hearing aid batteries, she was told to telephone the clinic or come in person. She couldn't hear on the phone. Traveling alone was not straightforward. None of this was flagged as a problem. These were, she was told, simply the rules.

This wasn't a story about one poorly-trained audiologist. It was a story about systems designed by people who never imagined Molly as their user.

Molly now works as an accessibility and usability consultant at Nexer Digital (see more below), advising clients that include the NHS, pharma giants and health insurance companies. She turned her experience of being failed by the system into a career helping to improve it.

The rise of digital health was supposed to fix accessibility. The shift to apps, patient portals, telehealth, and remote monitoring was framed, and genuinely intended, as a democratization of access. No more sitting in waiting rooms. No more geography as a barrier to specialist care. Healthcare, finally, on your terms.

For most patients, that promise has at least partially delivered. But for the 1.3 billion people globally living with a disability (16% of the world's population, according to the WHO) digital health has frequently created new barriers on top of existing ones. The design assumptions baked into most health tech are the assumptions of a sighted, hearing, dexterous, cognitively typical user. When those assumptions are wrong, the technology doesn't just fail to help, it actively excludes.

The core problem is not malice. It is the design pipeline.

Health tech is predominantly built by people without disabilities, tested on people without disabilities, and validated in studies where participants with significant impairments are routinely excluded. WCAG compliance is treated as a legal floor to clear, not a design ambition to reach. And even where compliance is nominally achieved, passing an automated audit and being genuinely usable by someone with Usher Syndrome are very different things.

The structural failure runs in three layers:

The scale of the market opportunity this creates is staggering. The global spending power of people with disabilities is estimated in the trillions. Assistive tech companies raised hundreds of millions in equity funding in 2025, with strong year-on-year growth. But the proportion of that capital directed specifically at digital health access, rather than physical assistive devices, remains thin.

A small number of companies are building accessibility in from the foundation rather than bolting it on afterward, and the contrast with the mainstream is instructive.

Cephable (US) builds AI-powered adaptive input technology that lets people control computers, health apps, and digital interfaces using:

This removes the foundational assumption that every user has reliable fine motor control. What sets Cephable apart is not just the technology but the build process: the company reports that 75% of its team members identify as having a disability, and its Cephable Consortium brings in people with cerebral palsy and other conditions to shape product decisions at every stage, as co-designers rather than testers.

Its logic is straightforward: the best health tech doesn't work for one type of user. It works because its foundations are inclusive.

That logic echoes something well-understood in physical design and too rarely applied digitally. Curb cuts were built for wheelchair users; they made life easier for parents with strollers, delivery workers, and cyclists everywhere. Electric toothbrushes were designed for people with limited dexterity, then became the default for everyone. Accessible design is not a compromise. It is frequently better design.

CareWindow, an Australian startup that completed the Remarkable Disability Tech Accelerator in 2024, has taken a different approach: hardware. It has built what it calls the world's simplest videophone, a purpose-designed device that:

Its target population is people who cannot use a smartphone due to dementia, unsteady hands, or cognitive impairment. The telehealth angle is direct: physical therapists, speech pathologists, and other remote care providers use the platform to reach patients they could not previously serve at all.

Neither company is yet at scale. But both are demonstrating that designing for the hardest use case from the start, rather than accommodating it after the fact, produces something fundamentally different from the accessibility-as-afterthought approach that dominates the sector.

The regulatory environment is tightening in both markets:

The tide is moving. Slowly, but in one direction.

For the founders and investors reading this: the window to build this well is now. The companies that get there first will not only do the right thing. They will own the infrastructure of healthcare access for a population that has been systematically overlooked for a decade.

Molly Watt did not accept those barriers as inevitable. She went on to work as an accessibility consultant, brief policymakers, and speak to clinicians and leaders at institutions including the UK Parliament and Harvard Medical School.

The NHS did not fail her because her needs were exceptional. It failed her because the system was built as if people like her were not expected to use it.

📐 Most agencies talk about accessibility. Nexer Digital is built around it. The UK-based design and development agency, headquartered in Macclesfield with offices in Cambridge, specialises in creating digital products that are genuinely inclusive rather than merely compliant – and there is a difference. Where most digital teams treat accessibility as a final QA step, Nexer embeds co-design with real users, including people with diverse abilities and low digital literacy, from the very start of a project.

Its clients include NHS England, Bupa, AstraZeneca, and the Department for Education. In healthcare specifically, Nexer has audited GP surgery websites across the UK, finding that two-thirds had detectable accessibility errors – and has worked directly with NHS trusts to fix them. It also runs Camp Digital, a well-regarded UX and design conference in Manchester that has become a focal point for the UK's inclusive design community.

🥚 Eggs for your brain. Scientists have spent decades telling us what not to eat for breakfast. Eggs have had a particularly rough ride – vilified for cholesterol, rehabilitated, vilified again, rehabilitated again. Now a 15-year study of nearly 40,000 participants by Loma Linda University has found that eating at least one egg a day, five days a week, is associated with a 27% reduction in Alzheimer's risk. Even eating eggs just one to three times a month was linked to a 17% reduction. The egg, it turns out, has been quietly doing neurological work while we were busy eating cereal and toast.

The mechanism is legitimate: eggs contain choline, lutein, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamin B12, all of which play documented roles in brain function and neuronal communication. More than 7 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer's, so the most cost-effective brain health intervention may have been sitting in your fridge the whole time!

Thank you for reading the Healthy Innovations newsletter!

Keep an eye out for next week’s issue, where I will highlight the healthcare innovations you need to know about.

Have a great week!

Alison ✨

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