Curb-cut effect
The pattern where a change made for people with disabilities ends up helping almost everyone.
The curb-cut effect takes its name from the ramps cut into sidewalk curbs so that people using wheelchairs could cross the street. As Angela Glover Blackwell wrote in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, when the wall of exclusion came down, everybody benefited, not only people in wheelchairs: parents pushing strollers headed straight for curb cuts, and so did workers pushing heavy carts, travelers wheeling luggage, even runners and skateboarders.
The same pattern runs through software. Captions serve people in a quiet office. Clear labels and error messages cut support email. Keyboard access speeds up anyone who prefers shortcuts. Text that resizes helps anyone who set their phone to larger text. The effect is the practical answer to “is this worth doing for a small group,” because the group is rarely small.
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