Category: Policy Research

Universal Design vs Individual Tailoring

On 26 November 2025

In (Dis)ability, Policy Research, Training and Coaching

Today: Both Is Good!

Universal Design and Individual Tailoring: Why We Need Both

People often frame accessibility as a choice: do we build universally, or do we tailor individually?
The reality is—of course—we need both.

Universal Design: dignity, efficiency, and reduced labour of inclusion.

Universal Design (UD) is often sold as a magic solution that will “catch everyone.”
It won’t. It never will. And that’s fine, because UD isn’t about perfection—it’s about coverage.

When we design materials, systems, spaces, and processes so they work for as many people as possible, several good things happen:

Fewer people have to declare their disability, which protects dignity and reduces the emotional admin of constantly explaining your needs, it reduces Labour of Inclusion.
Time and money are freed up to support the people who do require tailored adjustments.
Workload becomes manageable, because you’re not reinventing the wheel for every individual request.

A simple teaching example:

I have 120 students in a lecture.
Out of them:

10 are dyslexic
1 has visual issues (I don’t use impairment anymore, the Blind community feels strongly about this!)
1 needs large print

If I make inaccessible slides (e.g., Times New Roman, poor contrast, cluttered layout), I now have to respond to 12 individual adjustment schedules and produce multiple versions.

That is not a good use of my labour or institutional resources.

If I instead make one fully accessible slide deck from the start—clear font, high contrast, good structure—
I immediately meet the needs of 11 students.
Now there is only one student who requires a tailored version, and I actually have time and energy to give them what they need.

UD actually is a resource management tool.

Universal Design is not universal

There’s a myth that UD, if done well enough, will cover everybody.
It won’t. Human variation is vast and always will be.

UD doesn’t replace individual adjustments.
UD creates capacity for individual adjustments.

Think of it like triage in reverse: cover the majority up front, so you can do justice to the minority who require something different.

That is what real equity looks like.

Why both approaches matter

UD preserves dignity by removing the need for constant declarations.
Tailoring preserves equity by responding meaningfully to those whom UD cannot help.

Both matter.

And both are required.

But we also need systems to support this balance—for example:

Digital adjustment records that follow a person across departments or institutions
Reduction of repetitive disclosure
Consistent accessible design standards

The point is simple:
Universal Design is not a replacement for individual adjustment.
It is the foundation that makes genuine equity possible—by freeing up resources to respond well, respectfully, and promptly to those whose needs fall outside the majority design.

Dual approaches aren’t a compromise.
They’re the only way forward.

Nov 26, 2025

By Claire Graf

On 20 November 2025

In (Dis)ability, Policy Research

How Policy Must Be Built to Work for Disabled Staff

[cross-posted from my work in WhoCares, https://whocares.ed.ac.uk/]

Work Package One, part of WhoCares, starts with the most fundamental question in disability governance:

How does policy need to be designed, structured, and embedded so that it actually works for disabled staff — not just on paper, but in everyday practice?

Universities often assume that writing a good disability or reasonable-adjustments policy is enough. WP1 shows why this isn’t true. A policy is only one component in a much larger system of recruitment, onboarding, HR procedures, line management, IT access, estates, health & safety, culture, and communication. If any part of that system fails, the policy fails with it.

What WP1 Does

WP1 maps this whole system — the “policy machine” — using approaches borrowed from systems engineering, aviation safety, and human factors. It looks at:

The policy itself: clarity, structure, responsibilities.
The policy network: how related policies reinforce or contradict it.
Implementation chains: who needs to know the policy and who actually does.
Human factors: workload, communication breakdowns, unconscious bias, norms, and the predictable ways people misinterpret, forget, or avoid policy.
The labour of inclusion: the hidden work disabled staff do because the system hasn’t been designed around them.

The aim is to diagnose where disability policy collapses: not at the level of legal compliance, but at the point of lived experience.

Why This Matters

Disabled staff do not experience “a disability policy.”
They experience the entire ecosystem around it.

A policy will only work if:

it is known,
it is understood,
it fits coherently into the wider policy environment,
it can be implemented by staff with the time, training, and resources to do so,
it accounts for human fallibility,
and it does not rely on disabled staff to constantly self-advocate, educate, chase, or correct the system.

Most UK universities currently fail at several of these points, creating a wide implementation gap: the difference between what the policy promises and what disabled staff actually experience. WP1 analyses why that gap exists — and how to close it.

What WP1 Contributes

1. A systems-based blueprint for policy that works.

Policies must be written and embedded like engineering systems: with defined subcomponents, interdependent parts, and checks that each part is installed and functional.

2. Human-factors insight into implementation failure.

Policy collapses not because people are malicious, but because they are overloaded, undertrained, distracted, or following local norms. WP1 uses human-factors models (including aviation’s Dirty Dozen) to analyse these predictable failure points.

3. Practical strategies to reduce the labour of inclusion.

WP1 identifies how policies must be designed to shift the workload off disabled staff — through better communication, automatic prompts, universal design, resource allocation, and built-in accountability.

In Summary

Work Package One provides the evidence base for building disability policy that actually works.
Not symbolic. Not aspirational. Operational.

It shows that effective disability policy isn’t one document — it is a functioning system, explicitly designed to overcome human factors and implementation gaps. And when that system works, disabled staff don’t just get support: they get equity, dignity, and the chance to do their work without carrying the extra labour that the system should carry for them.

Nov 20, 2025