The UAE has signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Federal law guarantees access to services for People of Determination, the country's preferred term, and the principle has been built into procurement, public services, and increasingly private digital products. For a bank, this means accessibility is not a nice-to-have for an empathetic team. It is a baseline expectation embedded in regulation, in customer protection, and in the bank's own standards.
The right reference for digital accessibility is WCAG 2.2 at the AA level, with attention to elements that are particularly relevant to financial interfaces. Contrast must hold, focus must be visible, errors must be specific and actionable, controls must be operable by keyboard alone. None of this is news. The harder challenges in a UAE bank are bilingualism and the texture of inclusion that goes beyond the WCAG box.
Designing for People of Determination
Three categories deserve careful attention in financial design. Customers with low vision rely on sufficient contrast, scalable type, and clean focus management. The bank's AED amounts must remain legible at 200 percent zoom; transaction history must scroll without visual collapse; statements must be available in formats that integrate with screen readers. Customers with motor impairments need large tap targets, generous timeout policies, and the ability to complete journeys without precise gestures. Swipe-only patterns are an accessibility regression unless paired with explicit alternatives. Customers with cognitive differences need plain language, predictable layouts, the ability to retract a decision before it commits, and the absence of artificial urgency.
Arabic and right-to-left layout
Arabic is not English in a different font. RTL layout reverses the visual flow, but it does so unevenly: numbers remain LTR within an RTL line, mixed-language text introduces bidirectional complexity, icons that imply direction (forward, back, send) need careful mirroring, and certain icons must not be mirrored at all (a clock, a credit card chip, a camera). Punctuation differs. Currency placement differs. The default font stack should be tested specifically; many app fonts include Arabic glyphs that look unbalanced next to Latin neighbours, and a mismatched stack reads as unfinished work.
Two patterns commonly fail when an English-first design is mirrored late: progress steps with arrows pointing the wrong way, and amount fields where the currency code drifts to the wrong side. Both are easy to catch in a single Arabic review, but only if the review is scheduled. Build it into every sprint that ships customer-facing change.
Languages beyond Arabic and English
The bank's customer base reads in Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog, Malayalam, Tamil, Russian, French, and Sinhala, among others. Full bilingualism in Arabic and English is the standard, but the next step on the inclusion ladder is selective multilingual support: terms and conditions on key products, fraud warnings, customer service in priority languages. Wholesale translation of the app is rarely the right ambition. Targeted translation of high-stakes touchpoints almost always is.
Numeracy and digital literacy
A senior product designer at ENBD will eventually meet a customer who can read fluently but who has not used digital banking before. Older customers, customers from rural backgrounds, customers whose previous bank was a counter and a stamp. Designing for them is not about dumbing down; it is about giving the same screen a quieter alternative. Larger type. Fewer simultaneous calls to action. A real-person path that does not punish them for asking. The bank that gets this right keeps customers who never raise their voice but never come back if they feel embarrassed.
Devices, networks, and budgets
The country runs on iPhones and high-end Android handsets. It also runs on three-year-old budget Androids in workers' housing in Sharjah. The same app sits on both. Performance budgets matter. Test on real low-end devices on slow networks; the experience that is fine on the latest Pixel can be unusable on a 2021 Galaxy A12 with a weak cell signal. Image weight, font subsetting, animation, and unnecessary background work all matter; a subtle accessibility win is the version that loads in three seconds rather than fourteen.