I used to think inclusive design was just about ramps and screen readers.
Turns out, the philosophy runs deeper than accomodating wheelchairs or vision impairments—it’s about confronting the uncomfortable truth that “normal” never existed in the first place. When designers at Microsoft started working on their Xbox Adaptive Controller around 2015, they weren’t just solving a technical problem; they were dismantling decades of assumptions about who gets to play video games and why. The lead engineer, I forget his name now, actually said something like “we designed for permanence, temporary, and situational disabilities,” which sounds corporate but actually rewires how you think about human variation. A new parent holding a baby has one hand unavailable—that’s situational. Someone with a broken arm? Temporary. And permanence speaks for itself, though even that category is messier than we admit.
Here’s the thing: inclusive design isn’t charity.
It’s pragmatic selfishness dressed up as empathy.
Wait—maybe that sounds cynical, but I mean it as a compliment.
The Curb Cut Effect and Why Your Grandmother Benefits From Disability Activism
The curb cut effect—named after those sloped sidewalk edges mandated by disability rights laws in the 1970s—describes how accomodations designed for one group end up helping everyone. Parents with strollers, delivery workers with hand trucks, travelers with wheeled luggage—they all use curb cuts without thinking about their origin. Angus Maguire, a researcher at Cambridge, roughly estimated that for every person using a wheelchair who benefits from a curb cut, eight to ten non-disabled people do too, though I’ve seen other numbers floating around. The philosophy here challenges what economists call “special interest” framing: if the majority benefits, was it ever really just for a minority? Honestly, this question makes my head hurt in a good way because it exposes how arbitrary our categories are.
Anyway, sensory diversity gets ignored constantly. People assume “diverse audiences” means racial or cultural differences, which matters definately, but neurodivergence—autism, ADHD, dyslexia, sensory processing variations—affects roughly 15-20% of the population depending on how you count. Flickering animations trigger migraines and seizures. Autoplay videos assault concentration. Pure white backgrounds cause visual stress for dyslexic readers, something I only learned embarassingly late in my career.
Why Universal Design Always Fails (And That Might Be The Point)
I guess the paradox is this: true universal design—one solution for literally everyone—is impossible.
Human variation is too wild, too contradictory. High-contrast text helps low-vision users but can strain others with light sensitivity. Audio descriptions assist blind users but overwhelm some autistic people sensitive to layered sounds. The philosopher Susan Wendell wrote in the 1990s about how disability forces us to accept “the rejected body”—not rejected by individuals, but by systems that demand efficiency and standardization. Her argument, if I’m remembering correctly, was that the ideal body doesn’t exist outside of cultural construction, yet we keep designing for it anyway. This creates what scholars call the “misfit”—not a person with deficits, but a person-environment mismatch. A wheelchair user isn’t disabled by their legs; they’re disabled by stairs that didn’t have to be the only option.
The Economics of Empathy and Why Companies Suddenly Care Now
Let’s be blunt about why inclusive design gained traction in the 2010s: money.
The disability market—people with disabilities plus their families and friends—represents roughly $13 trillion in annual disposable income globally, according to a 2020 report from Return on Disability Group, though like most economic figures, that’s someone’s educated guess rather than hard fact. When Apple added VoiceOver to the iPhone in 2009, they weren’t just being nice—they were capturing market share. Same with automatic doors, closed captions (initially designed for deaf viewers, now used by 80% of viewers in sound-sensitive environments like offices or public transit), and voice interfaces that help everyone from drivers to non-native speakers to people washing dishes who need to set a timer. The philosophical shift isn’t from selfishness to altruism; it’s recognizing that “edge cases” represent a massive, underserved market that also improves the product for everyone else.
I’ve seen this pattern repeat: resistance, then slow adoption, then retroactive obviousness. Inclusive design stops feeling like accommodation and starts feeling like good design, period. The curb cuts disappear into the landscape. Which maybe means the philosophy succeeded—or maybe it just means we’re good at forgetting who fought for the accessibility we now take for granted.
