Benchmarking Accessibility, Usability, and Universal Design - What Kind of Society Are We Building?

Can and should Universal Design (UD) be evaluated? We can check whether a website meets WCAG criteria, whether a door is wide enough, or whether someone completes a task. But these are accessibility and usability measures that tell us little about what UD, understood as something distinct from both, contributes at a broader scale. Existing UD evaluation tends to focus on the evaluation of two of its neighbours, accessibility and usability, and the field has yet to develop the tools to evaluate UD on its own terms. This paper proposes a Benchmarking Matrix that unburdens UD from compliance and evaluates each concept on its own terms: a 3×3 grid with accessibility, usability, and UD as columns and output, process, and societal impact as rows. Borrowing from the Positive Peace framework, it asks what conditions make UD possible and which indicators let us follow it over time. We tested the matrix in two workshops with about 15 researchers and practitioners, who filled seven cells (two output cells were set aside as already well established). Contrary to our expectation that the least familiar cells would draw the fewest inputs, the UD column, and especially the UD × Societal Impact cell, produced the richest and most novel input, including candidate proxy indicators such as trust in others and democratic participation. The matrix is a thinking tool, not a compliance checklist, and opens a path towards assessing UD as a societal phenomenon.