What Is Home Accessibility? Home accessibility is a sibling to
the concept of universal design, which advocates user-
friendliness for every home, regardless of who’s living in it.
Universal design, as described by the famed Center for Universal
Design at North Carolina State University and universal design
pioneer Ron Mace, is “the design of products and environments to
be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible,
without the need for adaptation or specialized design.” That
includes young and old, tall and short, those with perfect
vision and those who use glasses, those in wheelchairs or with a
touch of arthritis or with elderly parents who have moved in. An
offshoot of universal design is “visitability,” the concept of
making a home minimally accessible by incorporating at least one
threshold-free entryway and an accessible bedroom and bathroom
on the entryway level. Visitability gets its name from the
theory that such homes would enable a wheelchair user to
comfortably and safely live there fo