Start here
The lesson at a glance
- Time
- 10 minutes
- Audience
- Accessibility, Workforce, K–12 Schools, and Developers
- Format
- Short framing, a scenario, a roadmap activity, a debrief
- Materials
- The interactive lesson link, or the handout and slides
Essential question
How can we center people with disabilities in the design process?
The one idea participants leave with
A checklist tells you if a design meets the standard. The community tells you if it works. Community voice belongs at the start of design, and it stays through the end.
By the end, participants can
- Explain Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and “shift left” in their own words.
- Name what was missing from a design that met every standard.
- Write one concrete action for before, during, and after their own next project.
Know before you teach
Background for the facilitator
You do not have to be a CBPR researcher to teach this lesson. These four ideas are enough to teach it well and to answer most questions.
1. Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)
CBPR is a partnership approach. Community members, organizational representatives, and researchers work together in all phases of the work. Israel et al. (1998) describe a set of key principles. Three of them carry this lesson:
- Partnership in all phases. The community helps define the problem, shape the work, and interpret the results.
- A cyclical and iterative process. Partners return to each other again and again. It is a loop, and it is more than a single meeting.
- Findings go back to all partners. Results are shared in language that is understandable and respectful.
Israel et al. wrote about public health research. This lesson borrows those principles for design work on courses, trainings, tools, and policies.
2. CBPR with the disability community
Most CBPR projects involve communities defined by place, race, ethnicity, or occupation. Nicolaidis et al. (2011) show that it also works with a community defined by disability. Their partnership, AASPIRE (the Academic Autistic Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education), brings together autistic self-advocates, family members, professionals, and academic researchers. The team uses deliberate strategies to equalize power and to support different ways of communicating and collaborating.
3. Shift left
Shift left is a term from software development. Picture a project timeline drawn from left to right. Testing and review usually sit on the right, near the end. Shifting left moves them toward the start, when decisions are still open and changes cost less. In this lesson, the thing that moves left is community voice.
4. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and its limits
UDL is a framework for planning for learner differences from the start, so fewer fixes are needed later (Evmenova et al., 2024; Moriña et al., 2025). A review of 20 studies found that UDL training builds faculty teaching competence, and that UDL-based teaching improves learning, access, and participation for students (Moriña et al., 2025).
UDL also has thoughtful critics. Dolmage (2015, as cited in Moriña et al., 2025) cautions that UDL’s well-intentioned “all learners” framing can avoid naming disability, which weakens disability as a valued identity. That is the gap this lesson points at. A designer can follow UDL carefully and still be guessing about who the learner is.
A helpful fact for the room. The current UDL Guidelines, version 3.0, came out in 2024 (CAST, 2024). They were revised through a multi-year, community-driven process (Gravel et al., 2026). UDL itself was updated the way this lesson recommends.
Where the lesson’s UDL connections come from
| Stage | UDL connection | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Before | The UDL Design Cycle begins by considering learner variability. CBPR adds the step of asking. | Evmenova et al. (2024) |
| Throughout | Consideration 8.3, foster collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning. Consideration 8.5, offer action-oriented feedback. | CAST (2024) |
| After | Consideration 9.3, promote individual and collective reflection. | CAST (2024) |
Words to use with care
Disabled people, or people with disabilities?
Both are in use. Many people prefer identity-first language (“disabled person”), and many prefer person-first language (“person with a disability”). Follow the lead of the people in the room. The lesson uses both on purpose.
Self-advocate
A person with a disability who speaks and acts on their own behalf. In the lesson, self-advocates are named alongside students and family members as co-designers.
Co-design
Designing with the people who will use something, as partners with a share in the decisions. It differs from asking for feedback on a finished product.
WCAG
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the international standard for accessible digital content. Version 2.2 is the current one (World Wide Web Consortium, 2023). Jordan’s course met it.
Before the session
Prepare
Teach the lesson the way the lesson asks people to design. Check each item as you finish it. Your checks stay on this page only while it is open.
Materials
Access
0 of 8 ready
During the session
Run of show
Four parts, 10 minutes. Each part has a timer you can start. The timer is silent. When time is up, the clock changes color and shows the words “Time is up.”
If you are short on time. Part 1 is the densest. Trim your framing to the two definitions and one sentence about UDL, and protect the full 5 minutes for the roadmap.
Be ready
Questions you are likely to hear
“Isn’t following UDL and WCAG enough?”
Standards matter, and Jordan was right to follow them. Standards describe what a design includes. They do not tell you how it lands for a real person. The community does. The lesson asks for both.
“We do not have the time or budget for this.”
Start small. One conversation before a design decision is a real first step. Shift left also saves effort, because changes cost less early than after launch. Jordan spent eight months and still had to start over.
“Who counts as the community?”
The people most affected by what you are building. For a course, that includes disabled students. It can also include family members and self-advocates. Ask who is missing, and ask the people already at the table who else belongs there.
“What if no one has told us they have a disability?”
People choose whether to share that, and many do not. Invite partnership openly without asking anyone to disclose. Disability resource offices, student groups, and local self-advocacy organizations are good places to begin a relationship.
“Is this research? Do we have to get ethics approval?”
The lesson uses CBPR principles for design work, which is different from running a study. If you plan to collect data and publish it, talk with your institution’s review board first.
“Isn’t one disabled person on the team enough?”
One person speaks from their own experience and is not a stand-in for everyone. Disability is varied. The AASPIRE partnership, for example, includes self-advocates, family members, professionals, and researchers (Nicolaidis et al., 2011).
“Where does AI come in?”
Jordan’s course included an automated feature that passed the compliance review and still distressed a student. Automated and AI-driven features are design decisions too. The same roadmap applies to them. A recent framework for inclusive AI learning design is also built on UDL (Song et al., 2024).
Make it fit
Adapt the lesson
By time
| You have | Do this |
|---|---|
| 5 minutes | Read the scenario. Ask one question: “What was missing?” Have each person write one Before action. |
| 10 minutes | Run the lesson as written. |
| 20 minutes | Add the stage-ordering activity and the five-question check from the interactive lesson. Give the roadmap 8 minutes and the debrief 4. |
| Self-paced | Share the interactive lesson link. Ask participants to bring their copied roadmap to your next meeting. |
By audience
- Accessibility staff. Spend more time on the gap between passing an audit and working for people.
- Workforce. Use a training or onboarding example from your own organization for the roadmap.
- K–12 schools. Name students and families as the community. Keep the roadmap at the scale of one unit or one tool.
- Developers. Lead with shift left, a term they already know. Frame the roadmap around one feature.
Online or in person
- Online. Paste the scenario in chat as well as on screen. Let people answer the debrief in chat.
- In person. Offer the handout in print and digital form. Pairs can talk through the roadmap before writing.
After the session
Close your own loop
The lesson asks participants to tell the community what their input changed. Do the same with your participants.
- Ask. Before people leave, ask one question: “What would make this lesson work better for you?”
- Change something. Pick at least one suggestion and act on it.
- Report back. Send a short note that says what you heard and what you changed.
- Carry it forward. Keep a running list of changes so the next session starts ahead.
Sources
CAST. (2024). Universal Design for Learning guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org
Evmenova, A. S., Hollingshead, A., Lowrey, K. A., Rao, K., & Williams, L. D. (2024). Designing for diversity and inclusion: UDL-based strategies for college courses. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 37(1), 81–88.
Gravel, J. W., Tucker-Smith, N., Rose, D. H., Fornauf, B., Hughes, M. M., Lester, L., Rao, K., Singer, S., & Waitoller, F. R. (2026). UDL Guidelines 3.0: A community-driven, research-based process toward fulfilling the promise of Universal Design for Learning. International Journal for Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning, 1(2), 44–62.
Israel, B. A., Schulz, A. J., Parker, E. A., & Becker, A. B. (1998). Review of community-based research: Assessing partnership approaches to improve public health. Annual Review of Public Health, 19, 173–202. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.19.1.173
Moriña, A., Carballo, R., & Doménech, A. (2025). Transforming higher education: A systematic review of faculty training in UDL and its benefits. Teaching in Higher Education, 30(7), 1722–1739. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2465994
Nicolaidis, C., Raymaker, D., McDonald, K., Dern, S., Ashkenazy, E., Boisclair, C., Robertson, S., & Baggs, A. (2011). Collaboration strategies in nontraditional community-based participatory research partnerships: Lessons from an academic–community partnership with autistic self-advocates. Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, 5(2), 143–150. https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2011.0022
Song, Y., Weisberg, L. R., Zhang, S., Tian, X., Boyer, K. E., & Israel, M. (2024). A framework for inclusive AI learning design for diverse learners. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 6, Article 100212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2024.100212
World Wide Web Consortium. (2023). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/