Accommodating the disabled: new regulations

The built environment often appears to have been designed, unconsciously, around a stereotyped user who is between 18 and 40, male, of average height and weight, fit, right‐handed: in other words, for about 20 per cent of the population. The other 80 per cent — women, children, elderly people, those who are unusually tall or short, or left‐handed — have all tended to be limited to some degree by this approach.