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."

 The U.S. Bureau of the Census has estimated that 54 million Americans of all ages have disabilities; that is 20% or one in every five Americans, given a national population, as of July 1999, of 273 million. The Census Bureau defines disability as a limitation in a functional activity (e.g., seeing, walking) or in a socially defined role or task (e.g., working, going to school); in addition, people who received government assistance because of disability were included. Nearly 26 million individuals had severe disabilities or limitations that made them unable to perform everyday activities. They represent about 9.9% of all Americans, or about one in every ten ( McNeil, 1997, Table 1, p. 6). As large as it is, the number of Americans with disabilities rises year after year. The U.S. population of individuals with disabilities is growing by about one-half million persons every year.

An earlier study helps to cast some light on the needs of people with disabilities. Looking at people aged 15 and over who reported any kind of functional limitation, the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 1993 that:

•      17 million had difficulty walking as much as a city block and 9 million could not do that at all;
•     of the 16 million who had difficulty lifting and carrying a weight of ten pounds or more, 8 million could not do this at all;
•     of the 11 million who had difficulty understanding conversations, 900,000 could not hear them at all; and
•     10 million had difficulty reading the words and letters in ordinary newsprint and 1.6 million could not read them at all. ( McNeil, 1993, Table B, p. 6)

In general, the number of such individuals increases as ages rise; other than mental retardation and other learning-related conditions, disabilities usually are acquired rather than congenital (present at birth). Fewer than 3% of young children under three years of age have a disability. About 11% of those in K-12 programs do. The rate of disability leaps once people pass 50 years of age. Among persons aged 55 to 64, 36.6%, or more than one out of every three, have a disability, as do almost half (47%) of individuals aged 65 to 79 ( McNeil, 1997, Table 1, p. 6).

The kinds of disabilities people have differ by age range. About one-tenth of all K-12 students have disabilities. The most common are "specific learning disabilities"--conditions which make reading, doing math, and organizing difficult. Learning disabilities are also common in the college-age population. Substantial numbers of children, youth, and adults have attention deficit disorder (ADD), with or without hyperactivity. Adult/continuing education programs, by contrast, will often see participants with hearing and vision limitations; these conditions are much less prevalent in children, youth, and young adults. They will also find substantial numbers of students having physical disabilities that make getting around at least somewhat problematic. While the absolute number of older students who have learning disabilities or attention deficits is large, their prominence in adult/continuing education programs is reduced by the much-larger presence of older people having physical or sensory limitations. Gregg Vanderheiden, writing in the early 1990s during the heyday of the television series "Thirty Something," penned a summary he called "Thirty Something (Million): Should They Be Exceptions?" ( www.trace.wisc.edu/docs/3O-some ). This paper has good charts illustrating these differences by age range.

Teachers in K-12 schools will be informed of any disabilities the children may have, usually by the principal, who receives this information from the Individualized Education Program (IEP) Team that develops the child's individual plan for learning, called the IEP. In college and thereafter, however, it is the student's responsibility to alert the educator to any special needs. (I ask, in the first class of each semester: "If any of you has a special need, please e-mail me or see me after class." This lets them know I expect them to tell me, yet it avoids embarrassment.)