Hi designers!
Welcome to the 18th edition of CUxD newsletter – a curated set of learnings, inspiration, resources, and tips. We’re Clément & Sia, Internal Outreach Leads, and we’ll be writing to you on behalf of CUxD every week.
If you’re not familiar with CUxD (Cornell User Experience Design), we’re a centralized community for UI, UX, and product designers at Cornell. We learn and grow together both professionally and socially!
Want to be more learn more about UX design?
Table of Contents
Accessibility
Every week, we’ll explore a topic in design. In this edition, we’re talking about accessibility (also known as “a11y” for the eleven letters in between).
Accessibility Graduates Into Good Design
Features born for a11y become everyday conveniences: subtitles, automatic doors, curb ramps, voice assistants, autocorrect, text‑to‑speech. Designing inclusively future‑proofs products and expands utility for all.
Closed captions began for Deaf and hard-of-hearing users and now help everyone when sound is off or users are in noisy environments.
Image source: Richard Millwood
Alt text that works
Write concise, context‑aware descriptions (1–2 sentences) focused on what the image conveys. Avoid “image of…”, file names, or duplicating nearby text; end with a period. Also, good alt text changes based on article context. Imagine you were describing the image out loud to yourself – how would you talk about it?
Image source: Mangools
The State of the Web (And Why It’s Bad)
Most sites are non‑compliant, with repeatable, fixable issues (contrast, alt text, labels, focus, semantics). These gaps come from from low awareness, underfunding, skill deficits, and missing a11y in workflows.
Website homepage accessibility (2020 – 2024)
Source: WebAIM
How to defend accessibility: Ethical, Money, Legal
Defending the value of accessibility can be difficult, especially with lots of competing priorities. Here are a few arguments that can strengthen your case:
Ethical: we have a moral imperative to include people rather than exclude by inaction. If it’s the choice between turning away an individual or letting them on to a service, which would you choose?
Money: accessible flows drive signups, purchases, retention; 1 in 7 adults have disabilities, so making products accessible to them increases your market share (and revenue)
Legal: the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) applies to digital product too. There are also ongoing high‑profile suits and fines that show real consequences. For instance, in 2019, the US Supreme Court found Domino’s Pizza liable for not making their website accessible to a blind man (which violated federal law).
Source: The Guardian
Internships
New York, NY, $38 / hr
San Francisco, CA, $38 / hr
San Jose, CA, $30 / hr
Minneapolis, MN, $21.89 / hr
Washington, DC, $18 – 28 / hr
Advice from a fellow designer
About
Vicky Wang, Major in Information Science (UX & Data Science Concentrations), 2025 from Long Island, NY
Fav Figma shortcut
Y for annotation (for devs and pm), Option to check dimensions and to drag a copy of whatever element, cmd-opt-A select all matching objects and enter after selecting multiple text layers to edit their content all together (favorite while updating design systems)
Previous work experience
Incoming PM @ Capital One
Product Designer @ Twenty
Growth + Ops @ Classover
Research Assistant @ Artifact Labs
Product Designer @ SNIIP
Proudest design project
I’d say some of my proudest design work was during my time at Twenty, an open-source CRM, where I joined as the founding design intern this past summer. I got to help second-time founders bring a product to the world, leading branding and marketing efforts, shaping content strategy, and building with an open-source design system. I learned how to create plugins to design faster alongside 20 engineers, document files to keep them clean and scalable, and share work in a fast-moving discord community that taught me to truly embrace constant iteration.
With all those learnings, I supported the team in scaling and expanding their core workflow feature, shipping a full AI dashboard from scratch (!!), and moree. Beyond design, I met some of the most talented people and learned so much about product, startup execution, and what it means to communicate, lead, and build with ambition. The experience left me more inspired than ever both creatively and entrepreneurially.
Advice
It’s ok if you don’t have it all figured out yet. Start now. Learn fast. And iterate. Embrace and fall in love with the chaos because it makes living life a lot more fun :)
Design inspiration
Some cool designs for your dopamine hit.
Outro
That’s all for this week!
Have any feedback or want to see something on the newsletter next week? Email us at [email protected] or reply directly to this email.
See you soon,
Clément & Sia @ CUxD