Quick answer: Being inclusive means noticing and removing barriers before people have to fight for access, respecting how people describe themselves, and involving the people affected by decisions. If disability and chronic illness are missing from that work, the result is incomplete.
Inclusion is often reduced to good manners: learn someone’s name, listen, don’t be a jerk. Those things matter. They’re also the easy part.
A meeting can be friendly and still exclude the person who cannot get into the room. A website can use thoughtful language and still be unusable with a screen reader. A social plan can sound welcoming until the venue has stairs, no seating and nowhere quiet to step away. Someone can say they value diversity while assuming a person cannot be disabled because they work, exercise, travel or “look fine.”
At URevolution, we start from a simple position: disability belongs in diversity. Disabled and chronically ill people are also Black, queer, trans, migrants, parents, workers and part of every other community. Inclusion has to account for that reality rather than treating disability as an optional extra.
What does being inclusive actually mean?
Being inclusive means making it possible for people to participate without having to hide their needs, prove that those needs are legitimate, or feel grateful for access that could have been planned from the start.
That does not mean guessing what every disabled person needs. There is no universal disabled experience. Someone may use a wheelchair full-time, occasionally or not at all. Chronic illness can fluctuate. Neurodivergent people can have very different sensory and communication preferences. Two people with the same diagnosis can need completely different things.
So inclusion requires two habits at once: plan for access before someone asks, and stay willing to listen when your plan does not fit the actual person in front of you.
Language works the same way. Some people prefer identity-first language such as “disabled person”; others prefer person-first language such as “person with a disability.” The useful question is not “Which term is universally correct?” It is “How does this person or community describe themselves?” Our guide to the language people use around disability goes into that distinction in more detail.
10 practical ways to be more inclusive of disabled and chronically ill people
1. Plan for access before someone has to ask
Do the obvious checks early. Can someone enter the building without using stairs? Is there an accessible toilet? Is seating available? Can people join remotely? Are captions provided? Can written information be supplied in another format?
Access is easier when it is part of the plan rather than an awkward exception added after somebody discloses a disability. If you are organizing a conference, meeting or work function, our guide to planning an accessible corporate event covers the practical details.
2. Make communication accessible
Use captions for video. Add useful alt text to meaningful images. Write headings that describe what follows. Avoid making essential information available only in an image, audio clip or tiny block of text. Give people time to process information and ask whether another format would help.
Accessible communication is not synonymous with “simpler.” The point is to give people more than one workable way to receive and respond to information.
3. Stop treating appearance as evidence
You cannot reliably tell who is disabled by looking at them.
Invisible and fluctuating disabilities are still disabilities. Someone may walk and also use a wheelchair. They may work full-time and live with chronic pain. They may go to the gym and need disability accommodations. They may look energetic during a two-hour event and spend the next day recovering from it.
“You don’t look disabled” is not reassurance. It tells the other person that your idea of disability is narrower than their life.
4. Do not make people disclose more than they need to
People should not have to provide their medical history to justify every practical need.
If someone says they need a chair, a break, a quieter space, captions, written instructions or a different way to participate, respond to the need before turning the conversation into an interrogation. In formal employment or education settings there may be documentation processes, but ordinary human interactions rarely require you to diagnose somebody before believing them.
Privacy is part of inclusion too.
5. Make room literally, not just metaphorically
“Make space” is common inclusion language. Sometimes the problem is actual space.
Do not block accessible entrances with furniture. Leave room for mobility aids. Think about seating, queues, transport, lighting, noise and distance. If a dinner, party or meeting requires someone to stand for long periods, climb stairs or walk farther than expected, say so before they arrive.
A welcoming attitude does not make an inaccessible venue accessible.
6. Respect disability language without turning it into a purity test
Words matter because they carry assumptions. But inclusion is not a competition to catch someone using the wrong word.
Avoid demeaning terms and stereotypes. Respect the language people use for themselves. If somebody corrects you, adjust and move on. There are also genuine disagreements within disability communities about particular words and metaphors; context matters. Our article on ableist language and slurs looks at those debates in more detail.
7. Build flexibility into ordinary participation
Flexibility helps people without requiring them to announce a diagnosis first.
At work, that might mean remote participation, flexible hours, breaks or more than one way to contribute in a meeting. In education, it can mean different ways to engage with material. Socially, it can be as simple as making clear that leaving early, sitting down, declining food or changing plans is not going to become a drama.
This is also why inclusive recruitment needs more than a diversity statement. Small decisions in job ads, interviews and application processes can exclude disabled candidates before they ever meet the hiring manager. See our guide to more accessible job descriptions.
8. Include disabled people in decisions that affect them
Do not design an “inclusive” workplace, event, product or campaign entirely around assumptions about disabled people and ask for feedback once everything is finished.
Bring disabled people into the process early enough for their input to change the outcome. In professional settings, recognize that expertise has value. Lived experience is not free decoration for somebody else’s inclusion project.
9. Challenge ableism when it happens
Inclusion is not only about how you personally behave. It also matters what you let pass.
If somebody treats a disabled colleague as less capable, talks to a companion instead of the disabled person, turns disability into a joke, praises an ordinary activity as “inspirational” purely because a disabled person did it, or excludes somebody because access would require extra thought, say something.
You do not need a speech. Often a direct question is enough: “Why are we assuming they cannot do that?” “Can we choose an accessible venue instead?” “Have we asked what they need?”
10. Wear your values — then live them
Visible statements can start conversations. They can tell somebody what you care about. They can also become empty branding very quickly if your behaviour contradicts the words.
If you wear “Be Inclusive,” the shirt is not the evidence. What you do when access is inconvenient, somebody needs flexibility, or a disabled person challenges an assumption tells people far more.
What inclusion looks like in different settings
The details change. The basic questions do not: Who might be excluded by the default? What would make participation possible? Have we asked the people affected?
- At work: accessible recruitment, flexible ways of working, usable technology, accommodations without stigma, and disabled employees involved in decisions that affect them.
- Online: captions, alt text, readable structure, descriptive links, accessible forms and moderation that does not treat disability-based abuse as harmless banter.
- At events: accessible venues and toilets, seating, sensory considerations, clear access information before registration, and a real contact point for access questions.
- With friends and family: believing people about their limits, not making cancellation or fatigue into a character flaw, and choosing plans that do not repeatedly leave the same person out.
- In education: accessible materials, multiple ways to participate and an understanding that equality does not always mean making everyone do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way.
Intersectionality matters here. Disability can change how racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, poverty and other forms of exclusion are experienced. The answer is not to flatten everybody into one “diverse” group. It is to pay attention to the person and the barriers in front of them.
What to do when you get inclusion wrong
You will get things wrong. Everybody does.
The useful response is not a long explanation of your intentions. Listen. Work out what needs fixing. Apologize when an apology is due. Change the thing you can change.
Do not demand reassurance from the person who raised the problem. Do not turn one disabled person into your unpaid teacher for everything about disability. And do not abandon inclusion work because being corrected felt uncomfortable.
The standard is not perfection. It is whether your behaviour changes when you learn that something is excluding people.
Wear your values. Then live them.
URevolution’s “If you can be anything, Be Inclusive.”™ phrase was coined in 2018 by co-founder Corinne Gray. It became one of URevolution’s original designs.
You’ll find it on shirts, hoodies, hats, bags, mugs and other products because the words are meant to be seen. The slogan is not proof that someone is inclusive; what they do matters more.
Make a statement. Wear your values. Then make sure the values survive contact with real life.
Explore the Be Inclusive collection →
A simple inclusion check you can use anywhere
Before a meeting, event, social plan, piece of content or new process goes live, ask:
- Who could be excluded by the default?
- What barriers can we remove before somebody has to request an exception?
- Have we made assumptions about what disability looks like?
- Are there different workable ways to participate?
- Have the people affected had a meaningful say?
That is a better place to start than trying to memorize the perfect vocabulary or perform the perfect inclusive gesture.
Disability belongs in diversity. Inclusion becomes more credible when we act like it.
