My son is studying design in high school. Our conversations about it have given me a fresh way to think about something I encounter as a disabled person: the distance between what a designer intends and what someone can actually use.
He lives with an invisible disability. So do I. That gives those conversations a particular relevance. A person can look perfectly at ease in a room while finding the room exhausting. They can understand a task and still struggle with the way it has been presented.
This article grew from those discussions and from Sinéad Burke’s TED talk, “Why design should include everyone”. Burke asks a question I think belongs near the beginning of every design project: “Who are we not designing for?”
For me, that question reaches well beyond buildings and furniture. It applies to a school assignment, a checkout screen, an appointment system and the apparently simple business of finding somewhere to sit.
Design should include everyone because the choices we make about ordinary things help determine who can participate in ordinary life. You should not need to be a designer to have a say in that.
What inclusive design means in everyday life
Inclusive design means finding out who a design leaves out, involving those people in the work, and changing the design in response. It starts with the recognition that people have different bodies, senses, ways of thinking and amounts of energy.
Accessibility concerns whether people with disabilities can use something. Inclusive design describes an approach to making decisions that takes those differences seriously from the start. The two belong together.
Think about booking an appointment. A service might offer a beautifully simple telephone number. But if calling is the only way to book, that simplicity depends on being able to hear, speak and manage the conversation at the required time. Offering an accessible online form alongside the phone gives people another route.
Or consider a waiting area with no seats. It might look spacious and uncluttered in a photograph. For someone who cannot comfortably stand for long, the missing furniture becomes the main feature.
A design can look beautiful and still ask someone else to do all the adapting.
URevolution’s interview with inclusive design specialist Kat Holmes explores the people and assumptions behind design decisions. That is a useful place to begin: before deciding that someone is difficult to accommodate, look at what the design expects them to do.
Designing for invisible disabilities starts with believing people
Some barriers are easy to photograph. Others are harder to show: the effort of concentrating through background noise, the fatigue of standing in a queue, or the difficulty of completing a form before its timer runs out.
Invisible disability complicates the comfortable assumption that we can identify who needs access by looking at them. A person’s needs may also change from one day to the next. Yesterday’s manageable journey tells you little about today’s energy.
Designing with that uncertainty in mind means making options available without turning every request into a personal explanation. Clear written instructions can sit alongside spoken ones. A form can let someone save their progress. A place to rest can be available before a person has to ask for it.
Access should not depend on how convincingly someone explains their disability.
Recent research helps make the less visible barriers more concrete. A 2026 University of Manchester study of study spaces surveyed 159 students. In its neurodivergent group, which included people diagnosed or undergoing diagnosis, 67% reported avoiding spaces because of sensory discomfort, compared with 48% of the neurotypical group. Noise and lighting were prominent concerns.
The study measured students’ perceptions at one university; it did not test whether a redesign improved grades. Its findings nevertheless give designers useful questions to investigate: where can someone work quietly, adjust the light or choose a different kind of seat?
Neurodivergent people do not all have the same needs. Nor does invisible disability mean neurodivergence. The wider design lesson is to allow for differences that may never be obvious to the person who chooses the furniture or writes the instructions.
A quiet hour can help, and still leave something to improve
Public social media accounts put ordinary detail around these questions. In a September 2025 post on Reddit’s r/autism forum, a shopper welcomed their local supermarket’s quiet hour. They described being able to shop without using loud music through headphones to cope, while still wishing the store would dim its lights.
That is one person’s account, rather than evidence of how every autistic shopper experiences a supermarket. It is useful precisely because it is specific. A change helped. Another barrier remained.
For a designer or store manager, both parts of that feedback matter. It would be easy to celebrate the quieter shopping hour and stop listening. It would be more useful to ask what the remaining difficulty tells us.
I would also want to know whether people can attend at the available time, whether information about the session is easy to find, and what happens during the rest of the week. Those are practical questions for anyone planning a similar service.
One improvement does not finish the job. It gives you something to learn from.
Digital design can open a door or put up another barrier
A touchscreen is a good example of why inclusive design needs more than a list of supposedly good and bad objects.
In a March 2026 discussion on Reddit’s r/Blind forum, one contributor contrasted accessible smartphones with frustrating public touchscreens. Their argument was that the interface and its accessibility features mattered, rather than the mere presence of a screen.
Replies raised other concerns, including privacy when entering a PIN and the effort of learning an unfamiliar interface. A solution that works on your own phone may be much less useful at a payment terminal with people waiting behind you.
These are public accounts and opinions, not a representative survey. They show why testing a feature in isolation can miss the experience of using it. Getting a device to speak is only part of the task if the user also needs privacy, confidence and time.
The scale of basic web barriers remains sobering. WebAIM’s 2026 Million report found automatically detectable accessibility failures on 95.9% of the one million homepages it tested. Common problems included low-contrast text, missing image descriptions and missing labels for form controls.
Automated checks identify only some accessibility problems. That figure is not a measure of how much of each website is unusable, and a clean automated result would not prove that a site works for everyone. It does show how often familiar, detectable problems remain.
For a beginner, the practical starting point is quite ordinary: readable text, clearly labelled controls, ways to use a service without a mouse, and instructions that help when something goes wrong. Then ask people who use assistive technology to try the complete task.
URevolution’s profile of digital accessibility educator Nicole L’Etoile offers a further route into accessible learning and communication.
Let people help shape the design while it can still change
The conversations with my son also make me interested in how we teach design. Whose knowledge counts? At what point does someone get to say that an idea will not work for them?
A 2025 study of inclusive school playgrounds involved 13 children aged 10–12 at two Brisbane schools, including neurodivergent children. Through workshops, drawings and play prototypes, the children helped develop ideas for playgrounds they wanted to use. Sensory experiences, social interaction, challenge and nature emerged as priorities.
It was a small qualitative study, so its findings should not become a universal playground recipe. What interests me is the room it made for children’s own ideas, including challenge and play, rather than assuming adults already knew what they needed.
This is often called co-design: people affected by a design help shape it. The important part is whether their involvement can change a decision. An invitation to comment on a finished plan offers far less influence than an invitation to develop the plan.
People who struggle with your design have information your team needs.
For a school project, that might mean testing an early model with someone whose experience differs from yours. For a professional team, it means making participation accessible, paying people for their expertise and explaining what happened to their feedback.
No participant can represent every disabled person. Invite different perspectives, allow people to decline personal questions, and be ready to hear needs that pull in different directions. Sometimes the useful outcome will be a choice of settings or routes.
Five questions to ask before calling a design finished
You do not need specialist vocabulary to begin. Whether you are planning a classroom activity, building a website or making a product, these questions can help:
- Who has helped shape this? Look for people whose access needs are absent from the team’s own experience.
- What does the whole task require? Include finding information, getting started, handling mistakes and finishing. A usable front page is little comfort if the booking form fails.
- Where can people choose? Consider pace, position, sensory conditions and ways to communicate. Check that the alternatives are usable too.
- What have people actually tried? Test with people who encounter the barriers. Your own quick attempt cannot stand in for their experience.
- What will change because of the feedback? Give someone responsibility, time and resources to act on what you learn.
I want my son to have the freedom to be curious about design: to enjoy making something, question it, try again and listen to what another person notices.
I want the rest of us to keep that curiosity too. It is easy to become accustomed to a world that works reasonably well for you, then mistake that familiarity for evidence that it works for everyone.
Burke’s question is a good way to interrupt that habit. We can ask it while the drawing is still a sketch, while the website is still a prototype, while there is still time to move the chair.
Then we can invite the people we have missed into the work.
