The origins of universal design and UDL

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, experienced much frustration due to wheelchair-related mobility challenges. For example, as a young man studying at the University of North Carolina, he had to be carried up and down campus stairways to his classes, and he was unable to enter some washrooms.

Mace no doubt took away some motivation from those early frustrations because he graduated from UNC’s School of Design in 1966 and began an acclaimed career in architecture and design consulting. He assumed many leadership roles at state and national levels, and he was influential in getting progressive legislation passed around disability. Among Mace’s early achievements was his role in developing a building accessibility code for North Carolina, one of the first such codes of its kind and a model for other states. Elements of that statute were borrowed to draft federal laws including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. His later accomplishments included founding the Center for Universal Design, where he led a team in developing the seven “principles of universal design.” These accessibility principles highlight simplicity, flexibility, equitable use, intuitivity, error tolerance, and other now-familiar design fundamentals.

Thanks to Ronald Mace’s pioneering work, municipal designers began to routinely apply universal design principles when designing public buildings and spaces. Curb cuts are a frequently cited and instructive example. Originally conceived to address a specific need related to wheelchair mobility, curb cuts were soon noted to also accommodate the needs of the visually impaired as well as others who use strollers, bicycles, delivery dollies, scooters, and the like. Similarly, ramps; sliding, wide-entrance doorways; low-effort, leverstyle door handles; motion-activated lighting; closed-captioning; and many other universal design innovations are all appreciated for their broad functional appeal. This well-observed regularity that “what is necessary for some is good for all” has been branded the “curb cut effect.” But that’s not all. Because universal design features make task completion simpler and more intuitive, they maintain the autonomy, competence, and dignity of diverse users. They improve accessibility and user experience for all, and they reduce the need for special accommodations to only those individuals with the most exceptional needs. There is also a lower cost associated with proactively designing accessibility features from the outset versus retrofitting after the fact.

As the universal design of urban spaces became mainstream, initiative had been gathering on a parallel track to improve the accessibility of public school curricula. In 1984, educator–researchers David Rose and Anne Meyer founded the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) to explore how students with learning disabilities could benefit from computer technologies such as the Macintosh computer released that same year. Over time, however, CAST would adjust its mission. Soon after Ron Mace and his camp defined universal design in 1988, CAST envisioned Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Around that same time, legislation on disability was prompting a slow-but-sure transformation of general instruction to improve curriculum access for all students. CAST was growing, and by the mid-1990s it had widened its focus to removing curriculum barriers and supporting school- and systemwide change. In Meyer’s own words, they were now asking educators to think about, “How do we make this curriculum so that it helps whoever walks in the door?” (Bacon, 2014).