You've heard of the curb cut. It was built for wheelchair users, and now it helps everyone with a stroller, suitcase, or bike.
It's a great story. But it's only the start.
The things you use every day are full of design choices that started with one person's need. Most people never learn those stories. We want to share a few of them.
First, what is universal design?
The term came from architect Ron Mace. Mace, a wheelchair user since childhood after polio, defined universal design as the design of products and environments usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without needing adaptation or specialized design.
Mace drew a clear line between two ideas. Accessible design often produced separate features that could feel stigmatizing, like a ramp tacked onto the side of a building or a "special" entrance. Universal design aimed to make things everyone could use from the start.
Put simply:
Accessibility asks, "How do we let more people in?"
Universal design asks, "Why was there a side door at all?"
In 1997, Mace brought together architects, product designers, engineers, and researchers to write down the core principles. There are seven:
- Equitable use
- Flexibility in use
- Simple and intuitive use
- Perceptible information
- Tolerance for error
- Low physical effort
- Size and space for approach and use
Ten stories behind Universal Design
1. The typewriter began as a love letter
Around 1808, an Italian inventor named Pellegrino Turri had a friend who was losing her sight. He built the first documented typewriter for Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano so she could keep writing to him after she moved to another city. Several of her letters still survive, and they are the earliest known typed correspondence.
There's a bonus. Turri needed ink for his machine, so he also invented carbon paper.
Why it matters: One woman's need led to the typewriter, then the keyboard, then the one on your phone.
2. Your smartphone screen started with sore wrists
In the late 1990s, a grad student at the University of Delaware named Wayne Westerman had a problem. He developed repetitive stress problems while finishing his dissertation, which pushed him toward low-impact ways to type.
With his professor John Elias, he started a company called FingerWorks. Their gesture keyboard let people pinch and swipe instead of pressing keys, and it was built mainly for people with RSI and other conditions that make keyboards hard to use.
Then Apple came calling. Apple bought the company's patents and brought on Elias and Westerman, and the technology was used to create the iPhone, which launched in 2007.
Why it matters: Every pinch-to-zoom traces back to one person who couldn't type without pain.
3. The scanner on your desk was built to read aloud
In the 1970s, a young inventor named Ray Kurzweil had built software that could recognize printed letters in almost any font. He didn't know what to do with it yet.
Then he sat next to a blind man on a plane. The man explained that he needed access to all kinds of printed material. That gave Kurzweil his purpose. To build a reading machine, though, he needed two things that didn't exist yet: a flatbed scanner and a full text-to-speech program. So his team invented both.
The machine was unveiled on January 13, 1976, and Walter Cronkite let it read his famous sign-off on the evening news. Blind scientists from the National Federation of the Blind tested it and pushed for changes, such as a key that would announce what the other keys did.
Stevie Wonder saw a demo on the Today Show and became its first customer. Their friendship later led to the Kurzweil 250 synthesizer, one of the first electronic instruments to sound like a real grand piano.
Why it matters: Office scanners, apps that read text from a photo, and the voice that reads your directions aloud all share roots with one conversation on a plane.
4. Predictive text started as a way to speed up slow typing
When your phone guesses your next word, you're using an idea that researchers first aimed at people with physical disabilities.
For many people with physical disabilities, communicating by keyboard was painfully slow. In the late 1980s, researchers John Darragh and Ian Witten at the University of Calgary built the Reactive Keyboard. It predicted what the user would type next and let them pick from a menu of guesses. It also learned from each person's own writing, so the guesses got better over time.
Early versions ran on Unix, IBM PCs, and Macs, and they were free and could be adjusted to each user's needs.
Why it matters: Autocomplete saves everyone time. But it started with people for whom every keystroke took real effort.
5. The first long-playing records were audiobooks
Before vinyl albums held music, they held books.
In the early 1930s, Robert Irwin of the American Foundation for the Blind wanted a way for blind readers to hear books. Records at the time played only a few minutes per side, so his team built one with tightly packed grooves that could play for eighteen minutes, about as long as a narrator could read without a mistake. They also built two players: an electric one, and a hand-cranked one for homes without electricity.
Helen Keller helped win funding from President Roosevelt, and in 1935 a workshop in Manhattan began building the machines. Many of the workers who assembled them were blind. For more than a decade, long-playing records were almost entirely a technology for blind readers.
Why it matters: Every audiobook and podcast you play on your commute goes back to a wooden record player built for blind readers.
Read more: The First LP Records Were Audiobooks for the Blind (Paleofuture).
6. A watch you can read with your fingertips
The Bradley watch has no hands. Two small ball bearings, one on the face and one on the edge, show the time, and you can check it by touch.
Founder Hyungsoo Kim got the idea at MIT, where he had a blind classmate who struggled to tell the time. He named it after Brad Snyder, who lost his sight as a bomb disposal officer in Afghanistan and later won two Paralympic golds in 2012.
Here's the twist. Early reports found that only 1 to 2 percent of the watches went to blind buyers, and most went to sighted people. People loved it because it's discreet. You can check the time in a meeting without looking at your wrist.
Why it matters: Design for one group, do it beautifully, and you've made something everyone wants.
7. Buildings shaped by sign language
Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., built a whole architectural philosophy around how Deaf people move and talk. It's called DeafSpace. The guidelines list more than 150 design elements across five areas: sensory reach, space and proximity, mobility and proximity, light and color, and acoustics.
What does that look like? At one campus building, automatic sliding doors, wide hallways, and an open atrium let people sign to each other while they walk. Diffused natural light cuts glare and eye strain.
The ideas have spread beyond campus. For example, DeafSpace guidance calls for enough room for two signers to stand apart so their hands and faces stay visible.
Why it matters: Wide halls, soft light, and clear sightlines make a building calmer and friendlier for everyone.
8. A cereal box that talks to you
Most people squint at tiny print on food labels. For blind shoppers, RNIB found that nine in ten felt packaging information was hard or impossible to read.
Kellogg's tried a fix called NaviLens. It's a colorful code that phones can pick up from up to three meters away. Shoppers can then have ingredients, allergens, and recycling details read aloud. Unlike a QR code, you don't need to know exactly where the code is to scan it.
In the U.S., the codes came to Corn Flakes, Special K Original, Rice Krispies, and Crispix, and the app can share the information in up to 36 languages.
Why it matters: Anyone with a food allergy, reading glasses, or a second language can use it too.
9. A notch that tells you which card you're holding
Payment cards have become flat and smooth, with no raised numbers. That's sleek, but it means every card feels the same.
Mastercard's Touch Card adds a small notch on the short side: round, square, or triangle. The shape tells you whether you're holding a credit, debit, or prepaid card. The design works with regular card readers and ATMs, so it can roll out at scale.
Why it matters: Grabbing the right card in a dark bar or a crowded checkout line gets easier for everyone.
10. Deodorant, rethought from the cap down
Degree Inclusive was designed for people with upper-limb motor disabilities and vision impairments. It has a hooked cap for one-handed use, a magnetic closure, a better grip, a braille label, and a bigger roll-on applicator.
The team was led by designer Christina Mallon, who has limited arm mobility herself. Testers pointed out something no one expected: the click of the magnets when the cap lands in place reassures users that it's on.
Why it matters: A cast, a baby on your hip, a hand full of groceries. At some point, everyone needs a one-handed version.
The pattern behind every story
Look at these stories together and a pattern shows up:
- It starts with a real person. A countess, a grad student, a stranger on a plane, a classmate, a signer, a shopper, a mom.
- The fix is better, not "special." None of these feel exclusionary. They feel like good products.
- Everyone benefits. Sighted people buy the Bradley. Hearing people love DeafSpace halls. Every phone user swipes. Millions of commuters listen to audiobooks.
That's why universal design is a best practice. Designing for the edges makes things better in the middle. And almost everyone moves between those edges during their lives through injury, aging, pregnancy, parenting, or just a busy day.
Why we built the Zamonos Store
Zamonos started because of family. We saw firsthand how hard it can be to find places that work for the people we love. That's why our community shares accessibility reviews on Zamonos across mobility, vision, hearing, cognitive, dietary, medical, and societal needs.
But finding the right place is only half of it. People kept asking us about the right things that make life easier. These things exist. They're just scattered and hard to find.
So we built the Zamonos Store as a curated catalog of well-designed products that work for any of us.
We look for the same things the stories above have in common:
- Made with, by or for the people who use it
- Good-looking enough that anyone would want it
- Solving a problem
Universal design says no one should need a side door. The Zamonos Store is our way of putting the good stuff right out front.
