Universal Design Started in Architecture and Ended Up in a Treaty

Universal design means designing the thing once so that as many people as possible can use it, without anybody needing a separate version. It came out of American architecture in the 1980s. It picked up seven published principles in 1997. And in 2006 a United Nations convention wrote it into a treaty definition, which is how a phrase invented for buildings ended up describing a checkout page.

The treaty version is the one worth knowing, because it is broader than the original in exactly the way that matters to you. The 1997 definition covered products and environments. The Convention added programmes and services. A website is a service, so the treaty language reaches it and the architecture language never quite did.

The Treaty Definition, and the Sentence That Gets Dropped

The definition lives in Article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and it runs to two sentences. Almost everybody quotes the first one and stops.

The first sentence says universal design means the design of products, environments, programmes and services to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.

The second sentence says universal design shall not exclude assistive devices for particular groups of persons with disabilities where this is needed.

That second sentence is doing real work and dropping it inverts the idea. Read alone, the first sentence sounds like a promise that good design removes the need for a screen reader, a switch device or a refreshable braille display. The treaty says the opposite in the very next line. Universal design is about not building a separate door. It was never about taking anybody's tools away.

That distinction is the whole reason assistive technology and universal design sit together rather than competing. Your page being well built is what lets a screen reader do its job. Neither one replaces the other.

Universal Design Is Not the Same as Reasonable Accommodation

These two get used as though they were interchangeable, and the same Article defines both, a few lines apart. They are close to opposites in how they work.

The practical consequence is a budgeting one. Reasonable accommodation has a cost defence built into it and universal design does not, because universal design is a design decision rather than a duty owed to a named person. So the argument that a fix is too expensive belongs to the accommodation conversation, and it does not transfer.

One more line from the same Article is worth carrying. The Convention defines discrimination on the basis of disability to include the denial of reasonable accommodation, and it defines discrimination by purpose or effect. Intent is not part of the test. Not meaning to exclude anybody has never been a defence, in that treaty or in most of the laws written under it.

Ronald Mace Coined the Phrase, and He Coined It From Experience

Ronald L. Mace lived from 1941 to 1998. He was an architect, a product designer and a teacher, and he coined the term universal design to describe designing products and buildings for people regardless of age, ability or status in life. He contracted polio at nine and was a wheelchair user.

The detail that explains the idea is where he studied. Mace took his architecture degree at North Carolina State University in 1966, in a School of Design building whose restrooms, elevators and studios he could not use. He was carried up and down its stairs as a student. The person who invented universal design invented it inside a building designed without him in mind.

He put the problem plainly himself, years later. Designers, he said, were taught almost nothing about designing for children, or older people, or women, let alone people with disabilities. The focus was able-bodied six-foot adult males. Universal design was his name for widening that focus to everybody, all the time, everywhere.

The example everybody reaches for is the curb cut, and the usual telling of it is a few decades late. The first ones were built in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1945, after a disabled Second World War veteran petitioned the city for them. The better known story, the activists in Berkeley who poured their own ramp and then got the city to build an official one in 1972, comes twenty-seven years after that. And the argument people now call the curb cut effect was not a later marketing discovery. The Kalamazoo campaigners wrote it down themselves within a year, reporting that the ramps had helped disabled veterans, older and infirm people, and mothers pushing baby carriages.

In 1989 he founded a federally funded research center at NC State, first called the Center for Accessible Housing and later the Center for Universal Design. That center is where the seven principles came from, and it is the center's definition rather than a sentence of Mace's own that most people are quoting when they quote him.

The Seven Principles, Published in 1997

Version 2.0 of the Principles of Universal Design is dated April 1, 1997, and carries the Center's copyright. Ten people compiled it, described in the document as a working group of architects, product designers, engineers and environmental design researchers. The seven have been reprinted for nearly thirty years, usually without the third column below, which is where they actually touch your site.

The third column is ours rather than the Center's. The 1997 document was written for physical things and it names no web technology anywhere, so treating the principles as a checklist for a website means translating them, and somebody has to do the translating. Read the middle column as the source and the right-hand one as our reading of it.

There is a real thread from that working group to the standard you are measured against today. One of the ten who compiled the principles, Gregg Vanderheiden, went on to edit WCAG 2.0. So the line from 1997 to the rules in your audit report runs through an actual person rather than through a vague inheritance.

What the Principles Said They Did Not Cover

The Center published a caveat alongside the seven and it is the most useful paragraph in the whole document, because it heads off the objection everybody raises.

The principles address only universally usable design, it says, while the practice of design involves more than usability. Designers still have to bring economic, engineering, cultural, gender and environmental considerations of their own. The seven are guidance for serving as many people as possible, not a claim to be the whole of good design.

There is a sharper criticism worth knowing too, and it comes from disability historians rather than from opponents. The rise of universal design gave some organizations an easy way to talk about universality and stop talking about discrimination, which shifted the ground from a civil rights argument to a design one. That is not a reason to drop the idea. It is a reason to notice when a vendor uses the phrase to avoid naming who is currently being shut out.

Who the Convention Actually Binds

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted on December 13, 2006, opened for signature on March 30, 2007, and came into force on May 3, 2008. It now has more than 190 parties, and the European Union is one of them in its own right rather than only through its member states.

Two facts about that decide whether it means anything to you.

• The United States signed and never ratified. It signed on July 30, 2009, and the Senate rejected the resolution of ratification on December 4, 2012, by 61 votes to 38 against a two-thirds requirement. So a US business is not bound by this treaty. What binds a US business is the ADA and Section 508, which are separate instruments with their own force.
• The European Union is bound within the limits of its competence. That phrase is the EU's own, and it is why the Convention shows up in European accessibility law as the justification rather than as the rule. The instruments that actually bite are the European Accessibility Act and the Web Accessibility Directive.

So the honest answer to "does the CRPD apply to my site" is almost always no, not directly. Its obligations run to governments, not to companies. What it does is set the vocabulary and the direction that national laws are then written in, which is why the same phrases keep turning up in statutes drafted twelve time zones apart.

One clause is worth naming because it explains why standards exist at all. Article 4 obliges every state party to promote universal design in the development of standards and guidelines. That is the textual bridge from a human rights treaty to a document like EN 301 549, and it is the reason a procurement standard can trace its lineage back to a convention.

Universal Design, Inclusive Design and Design for All

Three phrases, largely one idea, and which one somebody uses tells you where they trained more than what they believe. W3C says as much, noting that the same broad ambition goes by different names in different regions.

There is one real difference under the vocabulary, and it is not a small one. The Stockholm Declaration requires the involvement of end users at every stage of the design process. The 1997 principles describe properties a finished design should have and say nothing about how it gets made. So Design for All builds in a participation duty that universal design does not, and anybody claiming the three are identical has to explain that away.

What Changes on Your Site, and What Does Not

Here is the part that saves you money. Universal design is a way of deciding what to build. It is not a standard, nothing measures conformance to it, and no law names it as the test your site has to pass. The test is WCAG, at the level your law or your contract names.

So a team that adopts universal design language and skips the audit has bought the philosophy and none of the evidence. It happens often enough that it is worth saying plainly. What the idea is genuinely good for is the argument before the work, when somebody proposes a separate accessible version of a page, or a text-only mirror, or a widget that bolts a second experience onto the first. Those are exactly the separate doors the idea was invented to stop.

Two things you can do with it this week. Kill any proposal for a parallel accessible version, because one page that works is cheaper to maintain and better for everybody than two pages that drift apart. And when a vendor sells you universal design, ask which WCAG level their product meets and ask to see the report, because the phrase is not a substitute for one.