This brief post is an excerpt from "Universal design supports access, autonomy, and self-regulation," a section of my book "Ready to Learn: A crash course in child development, and how children experience school." Embedding need-satisfying provisions to create a barrier-free environment for diverse users is known as universal design . The term was coined by American Ronald Lawrence Mace. In 1950, at the age of nine, Mace was diagnosed with polio and, by all accounts, experien