Axis, an accessibility layer for every app

The thing no one designs for

Every interface assumes you can see it. Blind and low-vision users have been quietly working around that assumption for years, memorizing navigation paths by hand, holding entire hierarchies in their heads, supplying the precision the design should have given them. They’re doing the interface’s labor for it.

And here’s what reframed the entire project for me: visibility isn’t binary. It shifts with disability, but also with aging, fatigue, cognitive load, even glare on a sunny day. The problem was never the users. It was the design.

We listened before we built

This was nine months of designing with, not for. We ran digital ethnography across r/Blind and accessibility forums, and, more importantly, co-designed directly with blind and low-vision partners, so every decision was grounded in lived experience instead of our assumptions. We mapped the landscape three ways: where accessible music lives today, who we aspired to be, and where we could borrow patterns from outside the category entirely.

Meet Axis

We started out building a music accessibility tool. Somewhere in the research, it cracked open: the problem we were solving had nothing to do with music. Every app had the same disease, buried hierarchy, tiny targets, icons with no words, density that drowns you. We weren’t designing a better Spotify, we were designing a layer that could sit on top of anything. That shift, from one app to a horizontal infrastructure layer, is the moment Axis became what it is: a plug-and-play layer that lives inside the apps people already use, restructures the interface in real time when you toggle it on, and adapts instantly, no separate download, no new app to learn.

Open the live prototype in a new tab →

Small changes, big difference

Axis doesn’t redesign apps, it restructures them around a few consistent principles: less information density and clearer priority, a clean linear hierarchy, bigger tap targets, high contrast with guiding text beside every icon, and shortcuts to the actions people actually use.

Why iOS and Spotify

To prove the interaction logic without rebuilding the world, we anchored the prototype to one platform and one product. iOS gave us a common foundation, Spotify had well-documented accessibility gaps, and music is something people reach for every single day, the right place to test whether the pattern held.

What users told us

The response that mattered most: Axis felt native, chameleon-like, matching Spotify rather than bolted on top of it. And its value reached far past the group we started with, people with dyslexia and ADHD, anyone in bright sun, wearing gloves, one-handed, or just overwhelmed.

One participant gave us our north star: the goal is “having the accessible mode by default, and people just use a normal interface.” Accessibility baked into the default, not quarantined into a separate mode.

Start at the edge. End with everyone.

What could the future of Axis look like? It begins with visually impaired users and expands outward, to cognitive differences, to situational limits, to everyone. And the roadmap moves the same way: music today, then ride-sharing, banking, and food delivery, and eventually Axis operating at the OS level.