Enhancing accessibility in Duolingo
An inclusive design approach for diverse learners: redesigning Duolingo to serve users with hearing impairments, vision challenges, motor disabilities, and cognitive differences.
Assignment 3
Accessibility, WCAG
Duolingo redesign
Learning a language should be for everyone
Language learning is a powerful tool for personal and professional growth. Duolingo offers engaging ways to learn, but like many educational apps it struggles to fully meet the needs of users with disabilities.
For people with hearing and vision impairments, or motor and cognitive disabilities, traditional design choices create real barriers. This project redesigns Duolingo to be accessible for a diverse user base.
Duolingo leans heavily on audio, small interactive elements, and animations, all of which create barriers for users with different abilities.
Identify pain points, fold in user feedback, and design inclusive features that make language learning accessible and enjoyable for everyone.
User interviews, usability testing, surveys, competitive analysis, and WCAG standards guided every design decision.
Five barriers to accessible learning
Through interviews, usability testing, and surveys with users who have disabilities, five consistent pain points emerged, each tied to a design decision that could be improved.
Who we're designing for
A primary persona anchored every design decision, representing the intersection of hearing impairment and vision challenges that many real users face at once.
- Master German for an academic exchange in Germany
- Overcome accessibility barriers in language-learning apps
- Take part fully in academic and social life abroad
- Struggles with audio cues and spoken German exercises
- Finds small text and low-contrast colours hard to read
- Apps rarely support her hearing and vision needs together
Emma is a 25-year-old university student in Montreal preparing for an academic exchange in Germany. She has a hearing impairment and vision challenges, and depends on language apps to study. Most tools lean on audio and small, low-contrast visuals, which leave her working twice as hard to keep up.
Where the experience breaks down
Mapping Emma's lesson revealed exactly where frustration peaks, and where accessibility improvements would have the greatest impact.
How might we let a learner with hearing and vision needs move through a full lesson without hitting a wall she can't get around?
- Open the app
- Look for accessibility settings
- Start a lesson
- Read the prompt
- Tap through the intro
- Focus on new words
- Hear audio she can't parse
- Try to type
- Guess blindly
- Tap tiny word tiles
- Miss targets, make errors
- Fight low contrast in dark mode
- Complete the lesson
- Review her mistakes
- Weigh whether to continue
What the research revealed
The studies pointed to four clear design opportunities, each directly addressing one or more of the identified barriers.
Five accessibility improvements
Font size control
A slider in Vision Support lets users pick Small, Medium, Large, or X-Large text, with a live preview of the result.
Dark mode & colour themes
A dark mode toggle reduces eye strain, with customisable colour themes for individual visual needs.
Phonetic transcriptions
Phonetic text beside words in audio exercises, so users with hearing impairments can grasp pronunciation without sound.
Speech-to-text input
A microphone option on text exercises lets users with limited mobility or dyslexia speak their answers instead of typing.
Animation toggle
A preference to disable animations entirely, reducing overwhelm for neurodivergent users and those with vestibular disorders.
Speaking exercise toggle
Users can opt out of speaking exercises, removing a major barrier for those with speech impairments or hearing loss.
Three key improvements
Digital wireframes in Figma made the difference between the original design and the accessibility-focused redesign concrete.
New settings hand control to the user: a font size slider with a live preview for readability, a dark mode toggle with customisable colour themes to reduce eye strain, and toggles to switch off animations or speaking exercises based on individual needs.
Designed to WCAG principles
Every decision was validated against WCAG, so the redesign meets internationally recognised accessibility standards.
What I learned
This project deepened my understanding of inclusive design as a practice, not a checklist. Accessibility isn't about edge cases; designing for constraints makes the experience better for everyone.
Improvements like larger touch targets, better contrast, and phonetic text helped all users, not only those with disabilities. That's the curb-cut effect in practice.
Testing with users who have disabilities surfaces issues standard usability testing misses entirely. Diverse participants are how you find the real problems.
Run a full WCAG 2.2 audit, test with assistive-technology users (VoiceOver, Switch Access), and explore haptic feedback as an alternative to audio and visual cues.
Try the interactive prototype
View the full Figma prototype with all accessibility improvements applied and interactive.
Open in Figma ↗