A flight lands late, in a country this person has never visited, in a language they don’t speak. It doesn’t matter. The signs do the talking, big, bright, repeated at every turn. Along with tactile strips and icons that work whether or not you read the local language. Within minutes they’re at the right gate, no help needed. Three days later, the same person is standing in a hospital five minutes from their own house, and it’s a different story entirely. The signage runs out halfway down a corridor, and two staff members, when asked, point in two different directions. The person isn’t disabled. They’re not even lost in any dramatic sense. They’re just standing there, mildly panicked, wondering how a building this familiar, this close to home, this important, could feel so much harder to read than a foreign airport ever did.
This disconnect is where Episode 3 of Deconstructing Accessibility begins. The podcast series from Radio Udaan, in collaboration with Enable Me Access (EMA). Host Danish Mahajan sits down with Anubha Singhal, Co-founder of EMA, and Manika Bhalothia, Accessibility Research Associate at EMA, to ask a question that sounds almost backwards: why are airports, built for total strangers, easier to navigate than hospitals, built for people who are supposedly “regulars”?
Built for the World vs. Built for a Department
Manika lays out the core difference early. Airports serve an international, unpredictable crowd. Nobody knows who’s walking through next, or what language they speak, or whether they’ve ever set foot in that country before. So universal design isn’t optional there. It’s implied.
Hospitals don’t get built this way. They get built department by department – cardiology here, radiology there, each one designed around its own medical function. Designers rarely sit down and map out the actual journey a patient takes, from the entrance all the way to the right room.
Getting Lost Isn’t a Disability Problem. It’s a Design Problem.
Anubha pushes this further with something simple and a little uncomfortable: you don’t need a disability to get lost in an Indian hospital. She’s watched perfectly able-bodied visitors wander in circles, re-reading the same faded sign, backtracking twice before finding a lift. Signage goes missing halfway through a passage. Directions contradict each other. Nothing gets updated when a department moves. It’s stressful for anyone. For someone with mobility, vision, or cognitive disability, it’s often close to impossible to navigate a hospital independently.
The Assumption That Someone Else Will Handle It
Manika points to something deeper than bad signage: a mindset. India runs on a collectivist assumption that a patient will always have family or a caregiver alongside them. Therefore, hospitals don’t design for someone finding their way alone. They design assuming someone else is already doing the navigation for them. That assumption quietly erases the need for independent accessibility altogether. If you don’t have someone with you that day, the building simply wasn’t built with you in mind.
Airports Repeat Themselves. Hospitals Don’t.
Anubha compares the two systems directly. Airport signage is standardised, repeated, visible from every angle, the same everywhere in the world. You could land in a country you’ve never visited and still find your gate. Hospital signage, meanwhile, is fragmented with different fonts, different placements, sometimes missing entirely past a certain point, and rarely consistent from one hospital to the next, let alone one wing to another.
Additionally, the two dig into a longer list of everyday failures: polished floors so slippery they become a hazard, corridors lit just poorly enough to strain the eyes, no orientation map anywhere near the entrance, no automated doors at key entry points, no dual-sensory token or announcement systems to call patients for their turn, and toilets and grab bars installed without anyone checking if they’re actually usable.
No One to Ask, and No One Trained to Answer
In an airport, help can be booked in advance. Wheelchair assistance, a guide to the gate, someone stationed exactly where you need them. In a hospital, help means stopping strangers and hoping one of them knows the answer. Manika and Anubha are blunt about this: most hospital staff are never trained to guide a patient with a disability. It isn’t malice. It’s a training gap nobody has bothered to close.
What Would Actually Fix It
Toward the end, the conversation turns practical. Anubha and Manika aren’t asking for a total rebuild. They are asking for a shift in mindset. One where a healthcare facility is designed around the patient’s experience of moving through it, not just their medical treatment once they arrive. Consistent wayfinding and staff trained to guide someone who looks lost. None of it is complicated. All of it starts with that one shift in priority.
Deconstructing Accessibility is a 10-episode series by Radio Udaan in collaboration with Enable Me Access. New episodes drop weekly.
An airport can move a stranger from any country to the right gate without them asking a single question. A hospital, built for people who live five minutes away, still can’t get them to the right floor.