In the 1970s, disabled activists in Berkeley, California poured concrete to create the first kerb cuts — the sloped ramps between pavement and road. They did this without permission. They were sued. They won. Those ramps became infrastructure everyone uses.
Parents pushing prams. Delivery workers with hand-trolleys. People dragging suitcases. Cyclists. Skateboarders. Older people steadying themselves down a step they no longer have to take. The kerb cut was made for one group, and it improved life for everyone else who happened to share the footpath with them. That phenomenon has a name.
It's called the curb cut effect.
It's the observation that when you design specifically for the people most excluded by a system, the result usually works better for the population at large — not just at parity, but actively better. Captions made for Deaf TV viewers turn out to help anyone watching with the sound off. High-contrast UI made for people with low vision turns out to be more legible to anyone in bright light. Plain-language writing built for people with cognitive disabilities turns out to be faster reading for everyone, including the busy executives nobody had in mind.
It is not, as it's sometimes told, a "happy accident." It's a structural pattern. Designing for the harder case forces you to remove assumptions that 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 comes to us and 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 — the design problem itself. Design for the few, and you'll find you've also designed something better for the many.
That sounds like a slogan. It isn't. It's 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 — because if your copy doesn't land for the person with the highest barrier, your copy is leaking comprehension from everyone.
What it asks of us.
The activists who poured that concrete in Berkeley weren't waiting for the city to be ready. They didn't lead with a business case. They led with the conviction that the path had to work for them — and that this was non-negotiable. The world rearranged itself around that conviction.
Many accessibility programmes work the other way around. They lead with the business case and quietly hope the conviction will follow. It rarely does, because conviction isn't an output of business logic — it's a precondition for it.
So: lead with the people. 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 to move first, our work has the numbers — but the numbers are the second argument, never the first.
Where to start.
- Talk to the people most affected by the thing you're making — before you've made it. Not at the end, when you're "checking."
- Take their feedback seriously enough to redesign, not just to retitle.
- Test with assistive technology yourself. It's harder than reading a checklist, and it changes what you build.
- Stop calling accessibility a "feature." It's not optional. It's the design.
If any of this resonates, we'd like to talk. We work with NFPs, allied health, government and SMEs that have already decided this matters — our job is to show them what's possible, and then help them build it.