Who the Web Is For
When Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web in 1989, he described it as a system for communication — a way for people to share information across any hardware, software, or network with nothing in the way.[1]
But a medium that carries communication can also break it. And the web, despite its intentions, was built by people with particular assumptions about who would be on the other end: what kind of screen they had, how they'd interact with it, what they could see and hear and do. Those assumptions get baked into default behaviors. They're in what we reach for without thinking when we sit down to build something new.
The result is a web that is intended for everyone, but isn't built for everyone — not in every given moment, not for every person on the other end. This means a lot of communication breaks down before it starts.
This page is about what it would actually mean to build for everyone. And that "everyone" is a bigger and stranger category than it first appears.
Ability isn't fixed
It sounds obvious once you think about it: the same person can have completely different abilities from one hour to the next. Imagine these situations:
- It's Tuesday afternoon and you're holding a drink in your left hand and your phone in your right, trying to navigate a large screen with one thumb.
- It's a bright day and the glare on your phone screen is washing out the text on a page, making it hard to read.
- You're in a noisy public space and your headphones don't completely block out surrounding sound, so you can't understand the audio of the video you're trying to watch.
- You're exhausted and the dense paragraph you're reading just isn't sinking in. The way the text is laid out isn't making it any easier.
None of those situations involves a disability in the clinical sense. But all of them involve a real, present barrier between you and what you're trying to access. These situations could be greatly improved with accessibility features, even though none of them are permanent. Ability is a spectrum, and everyone moves along it constantly.
Universal Design: building for the full range
In the 1980s, an architect named Ron Mace started asking a different kind of question. Mace used a wheelchair, and he'd spent his career navigating buildings that quietly assumed he didn't exist. His insight wasn't just "we should accommodate disabled people." He decided the whole approach to design was wrong.
Most design, he argued, was built around a fictional standard person — young, able-bodied, with no unusual needs — and then adapted after the fact for everyone else. The adaptations were usually clunky, separate, and stigmatizing. Mace's proposal was to flip it: design for the full range of human experience from the start, rather than retrofitting for the edges afterward. He called this Universal Design.[2]
The classic example is the curb cut: the ramp sloped into the sidewalk curb that was originally designed for wheelchair users. Once curb cuts existed, everyone found use in them — cyclists, delivery workers, people with strollers, skaters, travelers with luggage, anyone whose hands were full and couldn't see the curb. The "accommodation" turned out to be just a better design for humans in general.
In 1997, Mace and a team at NC State University codified this into seven principles:[3]
- Equitable use — useful to people with diverse abilities
- Flexibility in use — accommodates a wide range of preferences and abilities
- Simple and intuitive use — easy to understand, regardless of experience
- Perceptible information — communicates necessary information effectively
- Tolerance for error — minimizes hazards and adverse consequences
- Low physical effort — efficient and comfortable, with minimum fatigue
- Size and space for approach and use — appropriate regardless of body or mobility
These were written for physical spaces. But a website is also a designed environment — one that people move through, navigate, get lost in, and sometimes hit walls in. The principles translate.
The key shift Universal Design asks for isn't technical. It's a question: instead of "who is our default user?", ask "who might actually be here, and what do they need?" That change in starting position leads to very different choices.
The spectrum: permanent, temporary, situational
A useful way to think about ability and access is through three categories — and only one of them is what we usually call "disability."
| Definition | Example | |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent | An ongoing condition affecting how someone interacts | Blind, Deaf, one-handed, color blind |
| Temporary | Short-term impairment with an end date | Broken wrist, eye surgery recovery, concussion, laryngitis |
| Situational | Context makes a usually-available ability temporarily unavailable | Holding a baby, bright sunlight on a screen, watching video on mute |
Microsoft's Inclusive Design research provides an idea of what this looks like at scale. For one-handed touch interaction alone: roughly 26,000 people in the US have permanent loss of upper extremities. When you include temporary and situational impairments, that number grows to over 20 million.[4] That's just one type of barrier — the same pattern holds across all of them.
Let's look at a few examples of accessibility features and who benefits:
Captions on a video
- Permanent
- a Deaf person
- Temporary
- someone with an ear infection, or recovering from ear surgery
- Situational
- someone watching in a public place without headphones
Good color contrast
- Permanent
- someone with low vision or color blindness
- Temporary
- someone post-eye-surgery with dilated pupils
- Situational
- someone on their phone outside on a bright day, or simply tired at 11pm
Keyboard-navigable interfaces
- Permanent
- someone with a motor impairment who can't use a mouse
- Temporary
- someone with a broken or sprained wrist
- Situational
- someone on a laptop with a bad trackpad, or a power user who prefers not to lift their hands
Plain, readable language
- Permanent
- someone with dyslexia, a cognitive disability, or a reading impairment
- Temporary
- someone with a concussion or severe migraine
- Situational
- someone reading in their second (or third, or fourth) language, someone anxious or sleep-deprived, someone in a hurry
All of these are examples of people just living their lives, interacting with the web in whatever moment they happen to be in. All of them could want to access your content. The question is whether or not they'll be able to.
What kinds of barriers do we build?
Instead of asking "who has a disability?", it's more useful to ask: what kinds of barriers can the choices I make create? Here's how they break down:
Each of these barriers hits people permanently, temporarily, and situationally. In order to help web designers think about these situations, W3C designed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They offer specific, testable criteria for addressing each barrier type.
Accessibility done well is good communication
The curb cut effect shows up in web design all the time:
- Captions were designed for Deaf users — and are now used constantly by people watching in noisy or quiet environments.
- Alt text was designed for screen readers — and is also read when images fail to load, indexed by search engines, and seen by users on slow connections with images turned off.
- High contrast was designed for low-vision users — and helps everyone on a bright screen, in dim light, or just at the end of a long day.
- Keyboard navigation was designed for motor-impaired users — and is quietly beloved by anyone who spends all day at a computer and doesn't want to move their hands.
- Clear heading structure was designed for screen reader navigation — and makes content easier to skim for everyone.
- Plain language was designed for cognitive accessibility — and is simply clearer and better writing for more people to understand.
It's worth being careful here: this isn't the same as saying "accessibility is just good UX in disguise." The people who need these things most, need them most. That's real, and it matters. But accessibility done well goes beyond checking boxes — it closes the gap in communication between you and your audience. More of the people who find what you made can actually receive what you meant to say.
That's the original intent of the web. It's also just what good building looks like.
So who is the web for?
The web is for everyone who wants to use it.
The practical fallout of that answer is: you can't predict every person or every moment. But you don't need to. Universal Design doesn't ask you to predict your users; it asks you to stop assuming things about them.
When you write alt text, you're not writing it "for blind people" — you're writing it for everyone who can't see that image right now, for whatever reason. When you make a layout that works without a mouse, you're not accommodating a disability — you're just not making a hardware assumption about your user. When you write clearly, you're not dumbing it down — you're making sure the message actually lands.
The web was designed to facilitate communication from anyone to anyone. Whether it actually does that is a set of small, repeated choices made in code.
WCAG is the web's attempt to codify what Universal Design looks like in practice — specific, testable criteria for the most common barriers. It's not a ceiling, and it's not the final word, but it's a solid floor, and it covers a lot of ground.
Learn more
These resources go deeper on the concepts covered here:
- Social Model of Disability — Wikipedia — the theory behind "barriers are in the design, not the person"
- Social Model + Digital Accessibility — Digital Culture Network — how the social model applies to web design specifically
- 7 Principles of Universal Design — RL Mace Universal Design Institute — the original principles from Mace's team
- Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit — the persona spectrum and inclusive design methodology
- Cognitive Accessibility at W3C WAI — deeper reading on cognitive and neurological barriers
- The Digital Curb Cut Effect — BOIA — more examples of accessible design benefiting everyone
Sources
- Tim Berners-Lee. "Information Management: A Proposal." CERN, March 1989. https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html ↩
- HEWI. "The Universal Design by Ronald Mace." https://www.hewi.com/en/mag/182-universal-design-ronald-mace (accessed June 2026) ↩
- RL Mace Universal Design Institute. "Universal Design Principles." https://www.udinstitute.org/principles (accessed June 2026) ↩
- Microsoft. "Inclusive 101 Guidebook." Microsoft Inclusive Design. https://inclusive.microsoft.design/articles/inclusive-101-guidebook (accessed June 2026) ↩