In the 1970s, disabled activists in Berkeley, California poured their own concrete kerb cuts, the sloped ramps between footpath and road. They did it without permission, got sued, and won. Those ramps became infrastructure everyone uses.
Think of parents pushing prams, delivery workers with hand-trolleys, people dragging suitcases, cyclists and skateboarders. Think of older people who no longer have to steady themselves down a step. The kerb cut was made for one group, and it made life easier for everyone else who shared the footpath with them. There's a name for that.
It's called the curb cut effect.
When you design for the people a system leaves out most, the result usually works better for everyone else too, and often noticeably so. Captions made for Deaf TV viewers help anyone watching with the sound off. High-contrast screens made for people with low vision are easier for anyone to read in bright light. Plain language written for people with cognitive disability is quicker for everyone to read, including the busy executives nobody had in mind.
People sometimes tell it as a happy accident. We see a pattern with a clear cause. Designing for the harder case makes you strip out assumptions the easier case was quietly relying on, and those assumptions usually weren't doing the easier case any favours either.
This is the principle behind our studio.
Everything we do at The Toy Cartel rests on this. When a client says "we want to be more inclusive", we don't treat that as a request to add ramps to an existing building. We treat it as the brief itself. Design for the few, and you'll find you've also designed something better for the many.
That might sound like a slogan, but we use it as a working method. It changes what you research first, who you put in the room, what you prototype and what you test for. It changes how you write, too. If your copy doesn't land for the person facing the biggest barrier, some of everyone else is getting lost as well.
What it asks of us.
The activists who poured that concrete in Berkeley weren't waiting for the city to be ready, and they didn't lead with a business case. They led with the belief that the path had to work for them, and they wouldn't budge on it. The world rearranged itself around that belief.
Many accessibility programmes work the other way around. They lead with the business case and quietly hope the belief will follow. It rarely does, because a business case on its own doesn't make people care. They have to care first, and then the numbers give them something to work with.
So lead with the people and build the thing they need. Trust that the rest of the population will benefit, because the curb cut effect is the most consistent finding in the field. And if your leadership needs the business case before it'll move, our work has the numbers. They're just the second argument, never the first.
Where to start.
- Talk to the people most affected by what you're making before you make it. By the time you're only "checking" at the end, it's too late.
- Take their feedback seriously enough to redesign, and be ready to change more than the labels.
- Test with assistive technology yourself. It's harder than reading a checklist, and it changes what you build.
- Stop calling accessibility a "feature", because that makes it sound optional. It's part of the design.
If this sounds like how you want to work, we'd like to talk. We work with NFPs, allied health, government and SMEs who have already decided this matters. We help them figure out what to make, then we make it with them.