RACHEL GROSSMAN-KAHN
ACCESSIBILITY DESIGN LEADER
Designing Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide
How we turned years of A11y expertise into an approachable, illustrated guide for everyday inclusion
Role: Co-Author, Illustrator & Visual Designer
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Collaborator: Nandita Gupta, Co-Author
Responsibilities: Accessibility Strategy · Content Design · Illustration · Visual Storytelling · Information Architecture · Writing & Editing · AI-Workflows · Layout Design · Accessibility Education
TLDR
I co-authored, illustrated, and designed Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide, transforming years of accessibility expertise into a practical, visual learning experience. I helped shape the book from initial concept and information architecture through writing, character development, illustration, editing, and final page layouts, using humor and storytelling to make accessibility approachable and actionable. Published internationally, the book became an Amazon Top Release, bringing practical accessibility education to readers around the world and inspiring them to join the accessibility movement and bringing everyone into the conversation.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
In our day jobs at Fortune 10 technology companies, my co-author Nandita Gupta and I work on accessibility initiatives that affect millions of people. We consult on products and features, evangelize accessibility to our colleagues, and advocate for more inclusive ways of designing and building technology.
Accessibility education is often centered around standards, compliance, and technical requirements like WCAG. Those things matter, but they can also make accessibility feel like a checkbox, kind of unexciting and dry. We wanted to approach it differently, and teach the everyday person how to make their communications accessible for people with disabilities.
What if accessibility education could be funny, visual, practical, and deeply human? What if someone could learn one idea and immediately use it to make an email, meeting, presentation, document, or social media post more inclusive?
The idea: let's make accessibility accessible. Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide was born.
CREATING A WORLD INSTEAD OF A TEXTBOOK
We knew early on that we didn't want the book to feel like a traditional accessibility manual. I had been drawing comics for years and had previously worked at Walt Disney Animation Studios. Nandita and I both loved the idea of using humor and visual storytelling to teach concepts that are often presented through dense technical documentation. But we needed a structure that could connect dozens of individual accessibility lessons.
Our solution was a story about a book club. We created nine recurring animal characters who have different disabilities, personalities, histories, professions, relationships, and ways of accessing books through varied assistive technology. Character development became one of the most important parts of the design process. We were careful not to create characters whose disability was their defining characteristic. Some characters were also inspired by pieces of our own lives. Sita, a kangaroo with a joey named Bodhi, was loosely inspired by my experience becoming a mother and experiencing severe postpartum depression after my son Bodhi was born.
Those personal connections helped us write disability from a place of lived experience rather than abstraction.
We deliberately chose animals rather than human characters. This gave us enormous creative freedom, prevented characters from becoming cariactures, and created enough distance for readers to encounter unfamiliar situations without immediately becoming defensive.
The book club gave us a world in which accessibility barriers could naturally occur. Instead of simply telling readers that something was inaccessible, we could show them what exclusion felt like.
FROM IDEA TO PUBLISHER
Once we had developed the concept, an outline, and several sample illustrations, we approached Packt Publishing, a UK-based publisher specializing in educational and technology books. We presented an unusual proposition: an accessibility book that combined practical education, lived experience, storytelling, humor, and original comics.They immediately saw the potential. We signed the contract while having a delicious Thai lunch!
WRITING THE BOOK
For each accessibility tip, Nandita and I started by talking. We discussed what we wanted someone to understand, why the concept mattered, common mistakes we had seen, and what a reader could realistically do differently. Much of the material wasn't knowledge we needed to discover through research. These were accessibility and inclusive design principles we had deeply internalized through years of professional practice. But lived experience also taught us something important: being an accessibility expert does not make you an expert on every disability experience.When a topic extended beyond our own experience or expertise, we reached out to trusted members of the disability community and our professional network. We asked questions, listened, and refined the material.
ILLUSTRATING
Once the written concept was taking shape, we matched accessibility concepts to characters whose experiences, personalities, or assistive technology made them a natural fit. Then the brainstorming got fun. We explored ways to turn abstract accessibility principles into memorable visual situations. Sometimes the illustration demonstrated the correct behavior. Other times we exaggerated an inaccessible experience to make the problem impossible to miss. Humor was a design tool, but never at the expense of the disabled character. The illustrations were part of the instructional design. Text could explain that an inaccessible experience was frustrating. An illustration could make you feel the frustration immediately.
Every comic began with a pencil. I would sketch the composition by hand, experimenting with character placement, expressions, perspective, dialogue, thought bubbles, and visual hierarchy. Often I would redraw the same idea several times. Could the expression communicate more than the dialogue? Could I remove words? Was the accessibility problem immediately understandable? Was the character reacting like a real person rather than serving as a teaching device?
Once the pencil composition was working, I used an AI-assisted workflow to convert the sketch into cleaner black linework. I then manually corrected lines, proportions, expressions, and details before bringing the illustration into Photoshop. There, I digitally painted each comic.
Early in the project, I created a constrained color system of roughly ten core colors. Limiting the palette helped dozens of illustrations created over many months feel like they belonged to the same visual world.
A finished illustration took approximately three hours on average. Many were created late at night after work, with multiple versions of camera angles, facial expressions, dialogue, and composition scattered across my bed.
ITERATION AND REVIEW
We worked chapter by chapter, submitting first and second drafts to our publisher. The process looked surprisingly similar to product design.
Create → Review → Test → Refine → Repeat.
Our editors challenged us when an explanation could be clearer or an illustration wasn't communicating the concept strongly enough. After our second drafts, Packt sent the manuscript to technical reviewers who were accessibility experts from around the world. Their feedback gave us another layer of perspective. We revised terminology. Clarified concepts. Reconsidered examples. Adjusted illustrations. Removed unnecessary complexity. And strengthened areas where our original explanation assumed too much knowledge from the reader.
The goal was not only for someone who wasn't an accessibility expert to understand the idea and know what to do next, but for them to feel invested and inspired and wanting to take the action.
THE LOOK OF THE BOOK: A DESIGN SYSTEM
As the book moved closer to publication, my role expanded beyond writing and illustration into detailed visual and layout design. I worked closely with Packt's production designer to lay out the book. I had a clear vision for each "tip" to have a two page spread: one full page illustration on the left, and the text on the right. That way, every time the reader turns the page they have a cognitive break and embrace the new spread ready for the next concept. Some tips were longer than others and bled onto a third or fourth page. For those I created bonus illustrations that reiterated concepts and served to fill out empty visual space.
I chose the typography for the headings in a handwritten comic style font consistent with my comics. I also fought for enlarged body and caption font sizes to make the book readable based on accessibility industry standards, not traditional print publishing. As the manuscript grew, another design challenge emerged: consistency. One illustration is an artwork. Dozens of illustrations, chapters, pro tips, thought questions, recurring characters, callouts, headings, examples, colors and teaching patterns become a design system. We had to make decisions that could scale across the entire book.
DESIGNING THE COVER
The cover needed to do a lot at once: communicate accessibility, capture the humor and personality of the book, and stand out from traditional educational and technology books.I created two custom concepts using characters from the book. The first featured Saul the Snake peeking out from a mysterious dark room, trying to lure readers inside with accessibility tips and snacks. It was funny and a little absurd, very much in the spirit of the book. The second was much bolder: Mayur the Peacock (who is a little extra) riding a disco wrecking ball and smashing through a brick wall spelling “ABLEISM.”
The metaphor captured what we wanted the book to do: give people practical tools to help break down barriers. We chose the wrecking-ball concept, but getting the message right took several rounds of iteration and collaboration. We brought the cover into a working session with the larger book team, including both authors, our Packt production designer, our relationship lead, and other members of the publishing team. Together, we reviewed the cover not just for visual impact, but for what the imagery actually communicated. In the first version, Mayur was swinging toward a wall with ABLEISM still completely intact. Without showing the wall actually breaking, the cover unintentionally gave ableism enormous visual prominence. Instead of looking like we were dismantling ableism, it almost looked like we were celebrating it. So we knocked down part of the wall. That solved one problem and created another. The letters “ABLE” remained standing, while the rest of the word crumbled away. Within the disability community, "able" is itself a loaded term, and the new composition could easily be interpreted as endorsing the very framing we were trying to challenge. Through our team critique, we kept returning to one question: Would someone understand the message immediately, without us there to explain it?
For the final version, we enlarged the lettering for better visibility, increased the color contrast to improve readability, and showed the letters themselves breaking apart along with the bricks. There was no longer any ambiguity: Mayur wasn't smashing part of ableism. He was smashing the whole thing. The process became a great example of how I approach accessibility and visual design: intent isn't enough. We have to consider how how the disability community may perceive it, and respect the loaded words common in the community.
ACCESSIBILITY
Nandita and I performed both an AI and manual audit on the accessible PDF copy of the book, which was made available to anyone who buys the paperback copy for free. We discovered several places the PDF was failing WCAG, such as the pro tips had been set up as tables which the screen reader was skipping, as well as a few missing alt texts. I spent considerable time and energy creating alt texts by hand for each illustration, as the illustrations are crucial to understanding the book. We provided the remediation feedback to Packt who fixed the document.
WHAT WE ULTIMATELY DESIGNED
After years of teaching others about accessibility, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that knowledge alone rarely changes behavior. People need to understand why something matters. They need to recognize themselves in the situation. They need an action that feels achievable. And most importantly, they need to care.
Those principles shaped nearly every decision I made in Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide. For me, this book is truly a love letter, one that poured out of my heart and into the hands of people who have the power to make everyday choices that better include people with disabilities.
We brought together our accessibility expertise, lived experience as disabled women, writing and illustration, humor, visual storytelling, AI-assisted workflows, and consultation with members of the disability community to make accessibility feel human, memorable, and actionable.
The result became the top-ranked new release on Amazon in UX design, released August 28, 2026, available internationally and bringing the power of accessibility to readers around the world. But the ranking isn't what makes me most proud. It's knowing that somewhere, someone may read one page, see the world a little differently, and make one small choice that helps another person feel included.
That's what we designed.
The response has already been powerful. Nandita and I have received invitations to speak about our book at conferences, universities, companies, libraries and book clubs. One of our early readers told us one chapter made her cry because she felt so seen.
