Designing for everyone: What accessibility research taught us

Lesson and curriculum planning already takes time. For some teachers, finding, reading and adapting resources can take even longer.

Accessibility isn’t only about meeting technical standards. The way resources are designed can either add to the time and effort involved in planning and teaching or help reduce it.

In March 2025, we partnered with User Vision, an agency specialising in accessibility research, to lead a study to understand what was working well and where small changes could make planning and teaching easier.

Why accessible design matters

The 2025 school workforce census reports 3% of teachers to be disabled in England¹. The true figure may be higher: 11% of respondents didn't disclose their disability status, and other research has found that stigma can prevent teachers from sharing this information².

The User Vision research study involved 12 disabled and neurodivergent teachers with a range of visual, hearing, physical and cognitive conditions. First, they used our website to find a relevant lesson. They then taught an Oak lesson in their classroom and told us about their experience.

Planning is already one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching. In the Department for Education's 2019 teacher workload survey³, teachers reported spending about 7 to 8 hours a week on lesson planning, and in a 2024 survey, 41%⁴ said they spent too much time planning lessons. Participants in our research told us that disability and neurodivergence can add further time and effort.

Fewer steps can reduce effort

Reducing clicks may seem like a small design choice. But for some, repeated movements can be physically difficult, and searching through information adds cognitive load, making planning less manageable.

We designed our website with this in mind by keeping information on a single page to reduce the need to switch between screens.

Participants generally found it easy to navigate the website and find resources, and valued the unit, lesson and lesson component overviews.

One teacher was particularly positive about how much easier planning seemed when they trialled using Oak as part of the research.

Some suggested making the search functionality more streamlined. We’ve made some improvements to this since the research and further work remains a priority.

Readable design can reduce strain

Teachers also valued the colours, contrast, font size and spacing across our website and resources. These choices made information easier to read and reduced visual strain. We chose the font Lexend because it is a crisp, rounded sans-serif with good letter spacing. This makes it ideal for users with dyslexia, as well as for those who use zoom tools or increase their font size.

The same was true of worksheets and quizzes. Teachers welcomed the clear layout, generous spacing and large text. Some also wanted formats that were easier to adjust before printing.

Resources need to work in real classrooms

Accessibility isn't only about finding and reading a resource. It also needs to work when a teacher uses it with a class. A couple of teachers expressed appreciation for the diversity and multicultural inclusion in the resources, which they felt was beneficial for their pupils.

Some teachers wanted more images in slide decks to support understanding. The lesson videos could be helpful when a teacher has lost their voice or needs to support remote learning, but teachers would like to navigate to specific sections more easily when using them in class. These findings have helped us identify areas for improvement on our website and resources, and we are actively working to implement these suggestions.

Independent audits help us find wider barriers

Alongside research with teachers, we commission independent audits of our website against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standard. Audit findings are then triaged and disseminated to the relevant teams so they can be fixed and retested. In doing so, we aim to remove hard barriers that can’t be overcome, while softening other barriers that present usability problems or could cause frustration.

For example, our 2024 audit found that screen reader users generally found our website easy to navigate and use. However, they weren’t always alerted when an action they’d taken changed content elsewhere on the page. To resolve this, we added short screen reader announcements to our search results pages and for pop-up notifications that could otherwise be missed by blind or visually impaired users.

Share your experience

Want to contribute to our future accessibility research? Join our teacher research panel to hear about research projects matched to your interests and share your experiences. Visit our Research page to find out how to take part.

If you have questions or feedback about the accessibility of our website or resources, please email [email protected]. Your experience can help us understand what to improve next.

You can also read our accessibility statement to learn more about the continued steps we're taking to improve in this area.