Making Immersive LLM Chat Experiences More Accessible

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21 min readAccessibility, AI, Web DesignShare on Twitter, LinkedInAbout The AuthorEric is a Boston-based designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs. More about Eric ↬Email NewsletterWeekly tips on front-end & UX.Trusted by 182,000+ folks. Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, 30 lessons + UX training Smart Interface Design Patterns, 45 lessons + UX training Design Patterns For AI Interfaces with Vitaly Friedman Meet AI 2027 Conference, December 1, 2026. Celebrating 10 million developersAs LLM chat patterns become more widespread, making them accessible is essential to ensuring everyone can access the information, tools, and opportunities they offer. Drawing on his work improving these interfaces, Eric Bailey shares practical ways to make chat-based experiences on the web more accessible and usable for people who rely on assistive technology.I have had the privilege of helping to improve the accessibility of multiple immersive LLM chat experiences in the course of my career. Now I want to share this knowledge with you.Accessibility is a core part of a functional digital experience. As the LLM chat pattern continues to spread like wildfire across the web, we risk excluding people if these experiences are not built with accessibility as a core consideration.It is also worth re-mentioning what “exclusion” means here: It’s the loss of knowledge, the loss of opportunity, the loss of utility, the loss of employability, the loss of entertainment, and more.What Is An Immersive LLM Chat Experience?

“Immersive LLM chat experience” is a catch-all term for full-screen experiences like Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Gemini, America.gov, Glean, and other similar websites and web apps:(Large preview)The majority of what this post covers applies to both web apps and native apps. This is because these experiences are typically built using web technologies, then placed in a native wrapper via frameworks such as Electron or Tauri.Immersive LLM chat experiences are not patterns such as a pop-up chat, inline text generation utilities, or summarization tools. These simpler applications of LLM technology will have different considerations and expectations. Instead, this is a starting point for making those other experiences accessible.ReframingThere is nothing special about chat-based UIs when viewed via the lens of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They are interactive experiences, built using web technologies. The losses I’ve described — and the legal liability associated with them — are access barriers in the same way any other web content can be an access barrier.I would also like to mention the social model of disability here: the idea that exclusion can be created by the built environment. For example, consider an elevated entryway that uses a gently sloping ramp in place of stairs.(Large preview)Built environments also extend to digital experiences, and the social model also applies here. The main activities undertaken to operate an LLM chat are already well-established:Inputting text and submitting it, andReading content and taking action on it.It is how we facilitate — or fail to facilitate — those interactions that’s the salient bit.Visual BiasBefore we get into the technical aspects, we must consider the overwhelming visual bias that permeates software creation.We live in a highly visual culture, so our outputs unconsciously reflect and reinforce that. What we need to do here is be aware of and think through the non-visual considerations.While not all disabilities are blindness or low vision conditions, a lot of the core interactions of an LLM chat do need specific accommodations for these two types of disability.Recall the social model of disability here, and how it applies to the main flow of using an LLM-based chat. You:Type some words into an input and send it as a message,Wait for the LLM to parse your message, thenRead the message the LLM gener