Inclusion4EU: Co-Designing Digital Futures for Older Persons and Persons with Disabilities

Introduction

Digital technologies are developing quickly and reshaping how we live, work and interact every day. From artificial intelligence and smart home devices to digital health platforms and online public services, digital transformation presents both opportunities and risks. For older persons and persons with disabilities, this transformation can offer greater independence by supporting the management of medical conditions or helping individuals navigate their environments without relying on others. They can also improve access to services such as healthcare and banking by removing the need for physical travel or long waiting times, or support social inclusion by enabling easier communication with family and friends. Yet, these same groups often face heightened risk of exclusion due to design processes that overlook their specific needs, preferences and lived experiences. Digital accessibility remains inconsistent, with many platforms and services lacking the features needed to accommodate diverse physical, sensory and cognitive abilities. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) which came into effect on June 28^th 2025 aims to address this by setting clear legal standards to ensure essential digital products and services are accessible to all users across the EU ¹.

However, legal compliance alone is not sufficient to ensure meaningful inclusion, and digital futures must not be engineered solely from the top down. Rather, they require participatory design approaches that actively involve the lived experiences of marginalized populations in the conception, development and evaluation of technologies. This contribution argues that co-design is not only a legal and ethical imperative but a practical strategy for ensuring relevance, usability and uptake of digital solutions.

Digital Transformation should not mean Digital Exclusion

Digital transformation has become a key driver of innovation in healthcare, government services, transport, and social care. However, digital progress has not been equitably distributed. Older persons and persons with disabilities often encounter barriers such as inaccessible interfaces, lack of digital literacy support, limited connectivity and products that do not account for cognitive or physical diversity.

Data from the European Union shows that while digital skills among the general population have steadily increased, significant gaps persist. Among people aged 65–74, only 25% possess basic digital skills, compared to 80% in younger age groups ². Persons with disabilities are 27% less likely to use the internet than persons without disabilities ³. These figures reflect structural inequalities that are reinforced when digital products are developed without inclusive design practices.

Beyond access, the issue lies in the way technologies are imagined and designed. Mainstream technology development is often guided by assumptions that prioritize speed, efficiency and homogeneity over equity and accessibility. To bridge this gap, digital inclusion efforts must go beyond retrofitting existing technologies and instead focus on co-creating solutions from the outset.

Co-Design

Co-design involves designing with, and not for, end-users who are stakeholders throughout the software development process. For older persons and persons with disabilities, co-design offers a means of self-determination, ensuring that technologies reflect their needs and contexts.

Effective co-design is not a token consultation. It requires sustained engagement via interviews, participatory workshops and technology trials guided by ethical sensitivity. Co-design also supports innovation by surfacing insights that developers and policymakers might otherwise overlook.

Involving older persons and persons with disabilities in co-design not only improves product relevance and usability, it also shifts the power dynamic by recognizing these groups not as passive recipients of technology but as active contributors to design, development, and decision-making processes.

The Inclusion4EU project

The Inclusion4EU project is a European initiative led by Technological University Dublin in partnership with St John of God Community Services Liffey and SAP. The project is focused on developing practical tools to make the software development process more inclusive and the project team have developed a co-design toolkit to support academics, technologists and diverse end-users collaboratively designing inclusive digital solutions. Rooted in participatory design principles and adapted from design thinking tools, the toolkit offers practical guidance, templates, and case studies to facilitate meaningful involvement of end-users throughout the software design and development process. It emphasizes empathy-building and iterative feedback to ensure that technologies are not only accessible but also genuinely responsive to the lived experiences and needs of diverse communities.

A set of co-design tools were created by the Digital Accessibility Team inSt John of God Community Services Liffey, in collaboration with co-designers, by adapting existing Design Thinking Tools (Stanford d.school and IDEO). The tools have been further tested and adapted as part of the Inclusion4EU project specifically exploring how diverse development teams engage with the tools.

Two overarching principles are critical to the development of these tools:

1. Use of simple English. All text from the tools was reviewed by co-designers and re-written using simple terms and sentences: nouns were avoided, and sentences were broken down into simpler grammatical structures.
2. Providing visual aids. For each tool, every field is supported by an image (photos or icons) to help overcome any literacy limitations.

Figure 1: Empathy Map

Figure 2: Managing Expectations

Figure 3: I like, I wish, What if?

Examples of tools include “The Empathy Map” (Figure 1), adapted from the d.school design thinking toolkit, which includes realistic pictures, simple text and a quadrant layout to make it more accessible for co-designers. “Managing expectations” (Figure 2), following the same design principles, is meant to bridge the gap between what end-users need and what software developers are capable of doing. This tool was implemented to assist in tackling this issue and to assist in providing realistic expectations of the resulting product for the co-designers. “I like, I wish, What if” (Figure 3), adapted from the d.school toolkit, includes realistic pictures, simple and large text to encourage co-designers to give detailed feedback.

One co-designer highlighted the value of accessible co-design tools, stating:
“The accessible Co-Design tools help us share what we like, what we wish could be different, and our ‘what ifs’ – like, what if we did it a new way?”

More information on these tools and how to use them is available as a toolkit from the Inclusion4EU ⁴ project website. The tools are openly available to encourage widespread adoption and adaptation.

Recommendations for Policy

The following recommendations reflect insights from our research and practice in the fields of accessibility, ageing, disability, and computer science. Taken together, these actions can help move beyond minimum compliance toward meaningful participation, embedding inclusion into the core of how public digital services and technologies are ideated, developed and delivered.

Mandate Co-Design in Publicly Funded Digital Projects: Require co-design methodologies in digital innovation projects receiving public funding, with particular emphasis on inclusion of underrepresented groups.

Invest in Capacity-Building: Provide training and resources for both technology developers and community organisations to engage meaningfully in co-design. Fund intermediaries who can bridge technical and social expertise and that can facilitate co-design collaborations between researchers, industry, service providers, and user communities.

Promote Interdisciplinary Approaches to Inclusion: The complexities of ageing, disability and digital exclusion cannot be adequately addressed by any single discipline. Emerging interdisciplinary fields such as gerontechnology (combining gerontology and technology) illustrate the need for integrated perspectives that bridge technical, clinical and social dimensions. This principle should extend beyond ageing to encompass disability studies, inclusive education, human-computer interaction, AI ethics and design justice.

Promote Ethical Guidelines for Co-Design: Support the development of ethical frameworks that safeguard the dignity, autonomy and privacy of participants in co-design processes.

Conclusion

As Europe advances its digital agenda, it must ensure that innovation does not exacerbate inequality. Co-design offers a powerful pathway to more inclusive and effective technologies by ensuring that digital solutions are practical, accessible and meet the real needs of older people and persons with disabilities.

References

[i] ¹Digital Futures Research Hub, Technological University Dublin, ²St John of God Community Services Liffey, ³NetWellCASALA Research Centre, Dundalk Institute of Technology ⁴SAP Accessibility and Inclusive Design