All access needs are equal, but some access needs are more equal than others: on digital accessibility (Part 2)
Why some access needs get dismissed as 'preferences', and what this means for accessibility and inclusion.
Last month, I shared some ideas about digital accessibility and universal design. We explored how the goal of universal design isn’t to create one format to rule them all. Instead, we should look to offer a range of opportunities and formats that allow all people to engage fully and equitably, without making compromises that affect one group to facilitate access for another.
You’ll notice throughout that article that I was using the concepts of access needs, accommodations, requirements, and preferences variously and interchangeably. Partially, this is because these often overlap and people have different language preferences; but also, because they have different connotations.
‘Access needs’ or ‘requirements’ feels most definitive and tangible: non-negotiable, and most legitimate when backed by external validation. Auslan interpretation, Braille, captioning, and Easy Read formats come to mind. These are broadly accepted as standard accessibility practice without much debate between those who are on-board with the principles of inclusion.
There are many other access needs that are just as legitimate, but tend to be framed differently. Things like additional processing time in live verbal interactions, summaries and visualisations of text-heavy information, sufficient context and detail to enable full understanding, and reduced text contrast. Instead of requirements, design and practice considerations that accommodate differences in auditory and visual processing, focus, attention, energy, and executive functioning are often classified as ‘preferences’ rather than requirements.
This dynamic extends beyond accessible communication into accessible and inclusive practice generally. A workplace accommodation that feels tangible and clearly ‘disability-related’ — a piece of screen-reading technology, an automatic door — is readily understood and accepted. A request for written instructions and clear meeting agendas gets minimised or waved away as a preference.
Why is this? How is it that some access needs are more equal than others? And what does this mean for our collective pursuit of accessible and inclusive practice?
The problem with ‘preference’
I generally prefer oat milk over soy milk. I like the texture better and the taste doesn’t interact too much with the flavour profile of the coffee I’m drinking. That doesn’t mean I’ll refuse a soy flat white — it’s not going to stop me drinking the coffee and it won’t ruin my day. A preference indicates a strong liking for something over another, developed through personal taste. It’s negotiable.
My requirement for clear meeting agendas with written discussion questions or intended outcomes, however, is not a preference. It is a requirement. When this isn’t available, I cannot participate in a meeting or workshop without additional and substantial cognitive load that disrupts my ability to participate fully and effectively.
Some access requirements are characterised as preferences, which increases the burden on the requestor. We have to push harder, explain more, and make a case that other people with more legible access needs don’t have to make about why we need it and how it’s related to our experience of disability.
The practical effect is a two-tiered system: access needs that are widely recognised as such, and access needs that require ongoing advocacy just to be taken seriously.
This hierarchy doesn’t seem to be based on the impact of the need, or how significantly it affects someone’s ability to participate. A person who cannot engage with text-heavy information without a visual summary is no less excluded than a person who cannot access a building without a ramp. Instead, I think there are two drivers of how access needs get classified: where an access support sits on a broader continuum of comfort, and how we have traditionally thought about communication and learning preferences.
Accessibility on a comfort continuum
The first driver comes from when disabled experiences overlap with common experiences of non-disabled people. My theory is that where an access requirement looks like something a non-disabled person might also want or benefit from in some way, it’s more likely to be dismissed as a preference.
When a person with chronic fatigue requests appropriate seating at an event where this hasn’t been considered, a non-disabled person might see it as a luxury. Surely everyone would like to sit down. Those wearing heels might have sore feet. It has been a long day. When a neurodivergent person requests a five-minute processing break at the midpoint of a meeting, the response can be that while a rest might be nice for all of us, time constraints mean perhaps this person should just step out while the meeting continues without them.
In both cases, fatigue and the need for rest are things a non-disabled person can understand and has likely experienced. You’d think that familiarity would make them more likely to accommodate the request. Instead, it sometimes has the opposite effect: the shared experience makes it harder to see the request as a disability-specific access requirement rather than a preference. Everyone’s tired. Everyone would enjoy a break. So, the request gets absorbed into the category of comfort rather than access, and the person with disability is either left making a case that shouldn’t need to be made, or gives in to the exclusion.
This tends to be particularly pronounced for access needs associated with chronic illness and neurodivergence. Experiences of chronic conditions and neurodivergent neurotypes — fatigue, sensory sensitivity, cognitive load, pain — exist on a continuum that non-disabled people can conceptually reach, even if they’ve never experienced it at the same intensity or frequency. That conceptual proximity, paradoxically, can work against the person seeking accommodation.
Think of it this way: no reasonable person would tell someone using a wheelchair that everyone finds stairs a bit tiring, so they should just give it a go (‘reasonable’ doing a lot of work here, as I know my mobility-aid-using colleagues have some unhinged stories about this!). The requirement is visible, legible, and clearly not a matter of comfort. But when the need is less visible, or sits closer to something a non-disabled person has experienced in a milder or less consequential form, that logic seems to stop applying.
Old learning styles die hard
The second driver is historical, and it has to do with how we’ve been trained to think about information formats. If you also did not predict this hard-turn into learning styles hate, buckle up. It’s been bubbling away in me since completing my Certificate IV in Training and Assessment…
The learning styles framework — the idea that we are each primarily visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic learners — was popular in schools and workplaces from the 1980s through to the early 2000s, and unfortunately continues to persist despite being comprehensively debunked. The evidence is clear that content consumption preferences and learning outcomes are contextual, change over time, and are shaped by neurological and social factors that a three-category model cannot capture.
Beyond being wrong about how people learn, I think this framework has done lasting damage to how institutions think about format and communication. In this framing, if you’re a ‘visual learner’, that’s just how you happen to like receiving information, not something the designer of a document or training program is obligated to accommodate. This thinking predates our more sophisticated understanding of neurotypes, specific learning disability, and accessibility generally, but it has shaped institutional cultures that are still with us and are very hard to shift.
For many neurodivergent people, how information is communicated isn’t a preference at all. It’s the difference between being able to engage and not being able to engage. But we’re working against decades of institutional attitudes that say otherwise.
These assumptions don’t only affect neurodivergent people: anyone whose access needs are tied to how information is structured or presented runs into the same old attitudes. Format has been coded as preference for so long that shifting that assumption requires deliberate effort. Oat milk or soy milk, you still get your coffee. For someone whose access need is tied to format, there is no equivalent workaround.
The cost of playing it safe
These dynamics can produce a response that makes things worse: the anxious and defensive simplification.
When I asked my colleague to retain a visual element in a data report — one that wasn’t screen-reader accessible, but was accompanied by an alternative text-based format presenting the same information — their instinct was to remove it entirely. Not because it was inaccessible in the context of the full document, but because they were worried about being criticised for publishing something that wasn’t ‘fully accessible’. The multiple means of representation we’d applied didn’t feel safe enough. One standard format, even if full of compromises, felt more defensible.
This is an understandable response. The disability community isn’t always forgiving, and for good reasons: needs are routinely ignored, lessons go unlearned, and people find themselves making the same requests repeatedly with no evidence anyone is listening. That history of poor practice creates pressure to default to simple, categorical rules. No tables. Everything must be screen-reader compatible. If it can’t be made accessible to everyone, remove it.
The problem is that these rules, applied without understanding, produce worse outcomes. Rather than publishing something full of compromises to be more accessible to an imagined average, a document stripped of all visual information is actually just less accessible for people whose primary access need is visual.
Accessibility isn’t a single axis along which we can optimise. Thinking about something universal as one thing for all is a simplification that tends to marginalise those with access requirements that get tossed in the ‘preference’ basket.
Putting my collectivist hat on, I also see a real risk of fracturing our community by how our access requirements are framed. People whose needs are clearly legible to institutions get taken seriously; people whose needs are more proximal to non-disabled comfort or coded as ‘preferences’ get left to fight for them. Those who are catered for stop fighting for the rest, and we risk forgetting about each other. That isn’t a dynamic that serves anyone. Disabled people are considerably more powerful collectively than when their experiences and needs are ranked against each other to create factions.
A more mature approach
Universal doesn’t mean one thing that’s the same for everyone. It means as many things as are required to provide genuinely universal access and outcomes.
In practice, this means accepting that no document, event, or program will be fully accessible to every person in every context. Offer multiple means of representation where possible, and be transparent about what you’ve done and why, rather than defaulting to whichever single format seems easiest to defend.
It also means taking access requests seriously regardless of whether they fit neatly into established categories or seem ‘right’ to you. For the person asking for written follow-up after a meeting, for a document in plain text rather than PDF, for a few minutes before they respond, the appropriate response is to take them at their word. Not to assess whether the request looks sufficiently ‘disability-like’ before deciding whether to honour it.
The access needs that tend to get dismissed as preferences are often the ones that require the environment or the process to change, rather than the individual to be given a tool. They can seem harder to accommodate, but they are equally important and valid. Often, addressing them well improves things for everyone. Providing seating benefits the person with chronic fatigue, the pregnant attendee, and the person who has been on their feet since 6am. Written summaries benefit the neurodivergent staff member with short-term memory differences, the overworked executive with a brain like a sieve, and the team member who was off sick and missed the meeting.
What access needs have you seen consistently underestimated or framed as preferences in your context? I’d be interested to hear what’s coming up in the comments, especially if you’re seeing patterns across sectors or types of requests.
