New Year: Renewed Hope for Disability Justice

The beginning of a new year often invites reflection. It’s a time when people talk about resolutions, fresh starts, and the kind of future they want to build. For many of us in the disability community, the new year is less about personal goals and more about intention—intention rooted in hope, persistence, and the belief that things can be different.

It is my hope that in the coming year, disability will be recognized as a natural part of the human condition.

That idea challenges a deeply ingrained way of thinking. Disability is still treated as something unusual, unfortunate, or separate from “normal” life, rather than as one of the many ways human beings exist. Human diversity has never been limited to race, culture, or language—it also includes the wide range of bodies, senses, and minds people are born with and live in every day.

Some people are born blind. Some people are born deaf. Some people are born neurodivergent or physically disabled. Others become disabled later in life through illness, injury, or aging. None of this is an exception to humanity; it is humanity.

Difference does not only emerge when bodies change over time. Difference is present from the very beginning. Disability is part of the natural spectrum of human variation, not a deviation from it. When we understand disability this way, it becomes impossible to treat disabled people as afterthoughts or problems to be solved.

When disability is framed as abnormal, society responds by excluding disabled people, trying to fix them, or offering limited accommodations only after barriers have already been built. Disabled people are expected to explain themselves, justify their needs, and repeatedly ask for access. Belonging becomes conditional. Access becomes optional.

Recognizing disability as a natural and enduring part of human diversity shifts responsibility to where it belongs. Instead of asking why disabled people don’t fit, we begin asking why our systems were designed to exclude so many people in the first place. That shift requires more than good intentions; it requires listening to disabled voices, trusting lived experience, and challenging cultural narratives that tie human worth to productivity, speed, or independence.

As we move into this new year and beyond, I hope we begin to move away from relying on accommodations as our default response to disability and toward embracing universal design. Accommodations, while sometimes necessary, are often reactive and individualized. They place the burden on disabled people to adapt to environments that were never built with them in mind.

Universal design offers a different vision. It asks us to design spaces, technologies, policies, and systems to be usable by as many people as possible from the very beginning.

A simple, familiar example is ramps. Ramps are often thought of as being “for wheelchair users,” but their benefits are far broader. Parents pushing strollers, travelers pulling rolling luggage, delivery workers moving carts, people with temporary injuries, older adults, and even someone having a bad balance day all benefit from ramps. No one has to ask for them. No one has to explain why they need them. They are simply there.

This is the power of universal design.

Captions help deaf users, but they also help people in noisy rooms or those processing information differently. Screen-reader-friendly websites support blind users while improving clarity and navigation for everyone. Clear signage, flexible work arrangements, and multiple ways to access information make spaces more usable for all of us, whether or not we identify as disabled.

Universal design is not about lowering standards or creating special features. It is about thoughtful, inclusive design that acknowledges human diversity as a given. It means building a world that does not require constant retrofitting, explanation, or exception-making just for people to exist in it.

Getting there requires a shift in power and perspective.

We get there by shifting responsibility from individuals to institutions. We get there by including disabled people at every stage of design and decision-making—not as an afterthought, but as leaders and experts. We get there by teaching accessibility and universal design as standard practice in schools, workplaces, and professional training—not as optional add-ons. And we get there by valuing access as essential, not inconvenient.

Hope without action is fragile. But hope paired with intention can change systems.

As this new year begins, my call to action is simple and urgent: stop waiting to be told who needs access and start designing as if everyone belongs. If you create content, make it accessible by default. If you lead teams or organizations, build accessibility into your processes from the start. If you design products, services, or spaces, include disabled people at the table—and listen when they speak.

And perhaps even more importantly, because a change in mindset is what leads to action, we must change how we think.

We need to stop treating disability as something to fear, avoid, or pity. Disability is not a tragedy waiting to happen, nor is it an object lesson in inspiration. It is part of the texture of the world. It is evidence of human variation, complexity, and reality. When we exclude disability from our understanding of diversity, we distort what humanity actually looks like.

This year, I am calling on all of us to reject narratives that frame disability as loss or failure and to recognize it instead as one of the many ways people live, move, communicate, and experience the world. Not sentimentally. Not rhetorically. But as a matter of fact.

This year, let’s move beyond accommodation and toward inclusion. Let’s stop asking disabled people to adapt endlessly to exclusion and instead build a world that expects us, includes us, and values us from the beginning.

Written By Michelle Friedman

Michelle Friedman is the board chair of Keshet in Chicago, a member of Disability Lead and has been a disability advocate for 40 years. She has written two children’s books and is a frequent speaker for elementary and high school-age students. #AllInForAllAbilities