The group of individuals with the most evident and pressing needs for universal design in education are persons who have disabilities. In demographics, we use "disability" to refer to permanent medical conditions that significantly limit people's abilities to engage in everyday activities. This definition helps us to estimate demand for accommodations in education, because going to school, reading, writing, and the like, are important activities of daily life. However, aside from demographics, we should think differently about people with disabilities. Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is fond of saying that "disability is something you experience, not something you are." What he means is that someone like me (I am deaf) will experience problems in one situation (I won't hear auditory alarms, for example) but not in others (deafness does not affect me in any way as I type this on my PC). Stated differently, as I did some 22 years ago ( Bowe, 1978): disability is an interaction between a person and an environment. It is not, in this understanding, a medical condition. Why does this matter? It matters because it tells us that if we modify the educational environment, even in small ways, students with disabilities will not encounter problems, or will face far fewer problems. We call the process of doing that "universal design in education."

Writing in late 1999 for Long Island's newspaper Newsday, Saul Friedman recounted the story of two senior citizens who signed up for a course at a community college. At the first class meeting, Friedman wrote, the teacher intoned: "This is not a course for seniors. Seniors think more slowly and can't absorb at the speed of the other students. I won't slow down for you people." That attitude is diametrically opposed to the spirit which infuses this book. As educators, we not only should accommodate nontraditional students; we will find, often to our own surprise, that by doing so, we enrich the educational experience for all our students.