For most of us, moving through the world is pretty easy. Our morning irritations come from someone getting a tube seat before us, cutting in front of us on the pavement or even, god forbid, jumping the queue in Pret. Our experience of the world is one of freedom and crucially independence.

Now imagine you live in a world that feels as though it wasn’t made for you, that seemingly wasn’t designed with your independence in mind at all.

In her TED talk Why Design Should Include Everyone, the Irish writer and academic Sinéad Burke asked the audience to look at the world from a different perspective, one they wouldn’t regularly inhabit. Burke, who recently became a contributing editor for British Vogue, has achondroplasia, a genetic disorder that results in dwarfism. In her debut column she wrote, “I mean, what does it mean to be normal? Having Achondroplasia liberated me from this very narrow descriptor…my greatest challenges are the design of the built environment and society’s assumptions about what I can and cannot achieve.”

A too common assumption is that if you have a certain disability you can’t do certain things. But we should really be looking at how we can change and alter our world to allow every person, whether they have a disability or not, to feel they have equal opportunities.

People who are disabled are a hugely unrepresented and yet a major consumer group. There are around 10 million people in the UK living with a disability according to the Disabled Living Foundation. Globally, there are around 1.3 billon people with a disability according to the ratings company Fifth Quadrant Analytics. That’s a market the size of China. This is not a small, ignorable proportion of society but rather an enormous contributor to both the country’s and the world’s economy.

We need to design for a more accessible world because the one we live in was built by people whose considerations didn’t extend to people with disabilities, whether visible or not. “People are therefore disabled by the society they live in, not directly by their impairment,” said Dr Graham Pullin in his book Design Meets Disability. The goal is that one day diverse representation and accessible design won’t have to be greeted with surprise. It will simply be reflected in products, systems and amongst designers themselves.

This is a space where brands can step in, observing their current designs and looking into how they can be altered to make them that bit more accessible.