Challenging the Biggest Misconception in Design!
Upstairs, a family reunion is in full swing — chairs scraping back, laughter spilling into the hallway, someone already refilling the food table. But not everyone’s made it inside yet. The elevator doors won’t budge, and the caterer stuck outside with two heavy trays can’t get them open either. An elderly guest lingers by the staircase, sizing up each step like an obstacle course. Near the entrance, a cousin who’s just landed from the airport is wrestling the front door open one-handed, suitcase in the other. None of them would call themselves disabled. In that moment, though, the building locks all of them out just the same.
That gap — between who we think accessibility is for and who actually needs it — is exactly where Enable Me Access (EMA) chose to begin its new podcast series, Deconstructing Accessibility, produced in collaboration with Radio Udaan. Over ten episodes, host Danish Mahajan sits down with experts to take apart the assumptions that quietly shape how India builds, designs, and includes. Episode one starts with the biggest assumption of all.
“Isn’t accessibility just for persons with disabilities?”
Danish puts the question straight to his guest, Anubha Singhal, Founder of EMA. Her answer arrives without hesitation: no, and believing otherwise is the single biggest misconception holding accessible design back in India today.
“When we build a ramp or an accessible toilet,” Anubha explains, “it’s not just people with disabilities who end up using it. It is most people.” A pregnant woman climbing stairs. An elderly parent navigating an unfamiliar building. A traveller wheeling a suitcase through a narrow doorway. A parent pushing a stroller through a turnstile built for one. Accessibility, she says, was never a favour to a few — it was infrastructure everyone eventually leans on.
The Fracture That Changes Your City Overnight
Danish presents a scenario almost everyone has experienced in some form: waking up with a fractured leg. Overnight, the office that was a five-minute walk away becomes a challenge even to enter. The metro ride you took for granted may no longer be possible. A single flight of stairs decides whether you go to work today or not.
“We rarely design as if this could ever be our own need,” Anubha reflects. And yet it usually is — a broken arm, an eye surgery, a pregnancy, the years after 60. With India’s elderly population expected to cross a quarter of the country in the coming decades, the temporary disabilities most of us will experience aren’t the exception. They’re the rules that accessible design should have been built around all along.
Why the Gap Exists
As a practising architect, Anubha doesn’t let her own profession off the hook. “In college, we were taught extensively about climate-oriented design — sun direction, wind movement, how that shapes a building’s orientation. But when that same building becomes a public space, used by literally anyone, the user’s actual journey through it barely enters the conversation. It gets missed.”
That’s not a small oversight. A design that isn’t universally accessible from day one doesn’t just exclude people — it costs money. “We lose out on the audience that space could have served,” Anubha points out. Retrofitting later is almost always more expensive, more disruptive, and less complete than building it right the first time.
When It Stopped Being Theory
Midway through her architecture degree, Anubha was diagnosed with Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, a rare, progressive condition that had never once come up in her training. “I had no idea how to design for accessibility as a student,” she recalls, “because architecture never taught us this.”
It was only years later — organising events for wheelchair users, and eventually using one herself — that the gap became impossible to unsee. “I realised our spaces simply weren’t designed for us. And neither was I, as a designer, designing for them.” Details she had once specified to clients on paper — the exact clearance an accessible toilet door needs — became real to her only once her own life depended on them.
Her advice to every designer, disabled or not: sit with the people who’ll actually use the space.
Ask. Don’t assume. It’s a principle EMA now builds directly into its training, through role-play exercises that put designers in shoes they’ve never walked in.
Building the Workforce This Requires
Toward the end of the conversation, Anubha shared what EMA has been quietly building toward: AccessAlly, a six-month program launching in August to train India’s next generation of accessibility professionals — people equipped to move universal design from a checklist to a lived reality, at a scale the country hasn’t attempted before.
For more details about the course, check out our AccessALLY training page. Listen to the full conversation: Watch Deconstructing Accessibility, Episode 1 and hear the discussion in full. Deconstructing Accessibility is a 10-episode series by Radio Udaan in collaboration with Enable Me Access. New episodes drop weekly.
Accessibility was never meant to be a wall around a few. It’s a door — and it swings both ways for all of us.