Beyond WCAG:
Moving Toward Inclusive Disability‑Centered Design

Inclusive Disability-Centered Design (IDCD) is a way of thinking about how to create more inclusive virtual and physical spaces while acknowledging the functional limitations of human bodyminds, our technologies, and our environments.

IDCD integrates existing frameworks for accessible design like Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) with broader social-cultural understandings of disability and its intersections with other diverse identities and experiences, building on and extending the concept of inclusive design to consider the accessibility needs of designers as well as users.

IDCD acknowledges that both accessibility and barriers to access are defined relative to particular contexts situated in time and space, and exist within a complex evolving web of shifting material and social relations among human bodyminds and their physical and social-cultural environments.

IDCD is not intended to replace existing frameworks like Universal Design or WCAG, but rather to supplement them by providing a central organizing narrative that can guide the practical implementation of these frameworks within real-world contexts. IDCD exists to question and disrupt conventional binaries between “designers” and “users.” Instead, IDCD views design itself as an ongoing collaborative process of social-cultural co-creation.

From an IDCD perspective,
design is always a conversation.