Essential Question: How can we center people with disabilities in the design process?
Total Time: 10 minutes
Format: Scenario walkthrough, then participant-generated roadmap artifact
Resources Attached and included:
- Pages file of this activity.
- A facilitator notes "One Pager" giving you a brief overview to help you carry this out.
- A "Roadmap Worksheet" that can be given to the people you are teaching this to.
- If you would like to see this as a FACILITATOR interactive page, you can use this link: https://storage.googleapis.com/prolific-academic-studies/udl-inclusive-ai-facilitator-guide.html
- If you would like to share/use the lesson as an interactive HTML with the PEOPLE YOU ARE TEACHING, you can use this link: https://storage.googleapis.com/prolific-academic-studies/udl-inclusive-ai-lesson.html
Part 1: CBPR and Shift Left (2 minutes, presenter-delivered)
Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is a partnership approach in which community members, organizational representatives, and researchers share decisions across every phase of the work (Israel et al., 1998). It rests on one premise: the people most affected by a problem are the most qualified to help solve it. In educational settings, that means disabled students, families, and self-advocates are co-designers from the start, before a single objective is written. Disability-focused partnerships show what this looks like in practice. AASPIRE (the Academic Autistic Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education) brings together autistic self-advocates, family members, professionals, and academic researchers, and uses deliberate strategies to equalize power among them (Nicolaidis et al., 2011).
This lesson organizes CBPR into five stages, adapted from established CBPR principles (Israel et al., 1998; Nicolaidis et al., 2011):
1. Relationship and Trust Building: Establishing genuine connections with the community before any design work begins.
2. Co-defining the Problem: Letting the community name what the actual barriers are, not assuming you already know.
3. Co-designing Solutions: Generating and evaluating options together while the design is still being made.
4. Implementation with Feedback Loops: Maintaining real-time channels for community input that can still change things.
5. Shared Dissemination: Closing the loop so the community knows what their voice changed, and crediting them as co-authors of the work.
This is the shift-left principle in practice. “Shift left” is a term borrowed from software development: move the checks that usually happen at the end of a process to the very start, where decisions are still open and changes cost less. Here, community voice does not enter at the review stage. It enters before the first design decision. UDL provides the architecture for that, building proactively for learner variability rather than retrofitting after the fact (Evmenova et al., 2024; Moriña et al., 2025). UDL itself models this: the UDL Guidelines 3.0 were revised through a multi-year, community-driven process (Gravel et al., 2026), and a recent framework for inclusive AI learning design is built on UDL as well (Song et al., 2024). But UDL without CBPR is still a designer’s assumption about who the learner is. Dolmage (2015, as cited in Moriña et al., 2025) cautions that UDL’s well-intentioned “all learners” framing can avoid naming disability, weakening disability as a valued identity. CBPR is what makes UDL honest.
Begin with the end in mind: picture the student you most want this to reach. Did they help you design it?
Part 2: The Scenario (2 minutes, read or displayed on slide)
Jordan is an instructional designer at a university. For eight months, they redesigned a required digital onboarding course that had been flagged as inaccessible. Jordan ran a full compliance review: every image got alt text, every video got captions, every PDF was properly structured. The course passed the institution's accessibility audit.
Jordan followed the current UDL Guidelines (version 3.0) and WCAG 2.2 standards throughout. Content was available in multiple formats. Assessments offered students several response options. Jordan checked every standard, followed every guideline, and consulted the published research. Three weeks after launch, the Disability Resource Center reached out. Several students had already stopped engaging. One student could not access the meaning behind the visual content, only its appearance. Another could not complete an assessment option because the format did not account for how long that task actually takes them. A third was distressed by an automated feature that technically passed compliance review. A group of students found the tone of several modules written about people like them, not with them.
Jordan had followed every checklist and every framework available. The course was technically compliant. It was UDL-aligned. It was built with care.
But no student with a disability, family member, or self-advocate was in the room when any of it was designed. No one co-defined the problem. No one was asked before the blueprint was drawn.
The lived experience of the people this course was built for was the last thing consulted, not the first.
Part 3: The Roadmap Activity (5 minutes)
Slide prompt: You are Jordan, starting over. Pick one thing you are currently building: a course, a program, a training, a tool, a policy. Use the three sections below to map out what CBPR-grounded design looks like for your context. The scope is yours. This works at any level.
Before: Before Any Design Decision Is Made
Who from the disability community needs to be at the table before any design decision is made? Not to review what you have built, but to help define what you are trying to build and why. What relationships do you need to establish first? What is the first question you would ask, not to validate your plan, but to understand what the actual barriers are from the people living them?
UDL connection: The UDL Design Cycle begins by considering learner variability (Evmenova et al., 2024). CBPR pushes that step further: you cannot design for learner variability you have never asked about.
Write one specific action you can take before your next design cycle opens:
Throughout: While You Are Building
What is your feedback loop? When and how do you return to that community while the design can still change? Who has a real channel to flag something mid-process, and does that channel actually lead to a change, or just a note in a file?
UDL connection: UDL 3.0 calls for fostering collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning (Consideration 8.3) and offering action-oriented feedback (Consideration 8.5; CAST, 2024). CBPR applies the same logic to the design process itself: partnership is a cyclical, iterative process, not a one-time consultation (Israel et al., 1998).
Write one checkpoint you will build into your process where you pause and return to community input:
After: When the Experience Ends
How do you close the loop? How does the community know their voice changed something? What do you document and carry forward into your next design cycle so this is not starting from zero next time?
UDL connection: Implementing UDL is an ongoing process of reflection on practice (Fovet, 2021, as cited in Moriña et al., 2025), and UDL 3.0 names individual and collective reflection as a design consideration (Consideration 9.3; CAST, 2024). Documenting what the community changed is how that reflection carries forward into your next design cycle.
Write one way you will communicate back to the community what their input changed:
Part 4: Debrief (1 minute)
Ask two participants to share one entry from any section. Close with: the checklist tells you if your design meets the standard. The community tells you if it actually works. Jordan met the standard. That was not enough.
References
- 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 ofcommunity-based research: Assessing partnership approaches to improve publichealth. 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
Usage Rights:
This Teaching Kit was designed to help educators and learners design, deploy, and use AI with a human-centered approach. It was created in collaboration with a network of higher education and nonprofit organizations and has been made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).
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