The Unseen Barriers Framework

The barriers we highlight cannot always be seen — stairs, steps, signage. These are visible. Others are felt: shame, fatigue, sensory overload, panic. The Unseen Barriers Framework was developed by Shaun Gray and created to name the ways in which many disabled people are still excluded or harmed, even when "access" has technically been provided.

Core Barriers

Scent Distress

Triggered by sensory overwhelm caused by scents like perfume, strong cleaning products, cigarette smoke, air fresheners, or even body scent. For some, these can cause nausea, anxiety, or full shutdown.

Communication Management Distress

Distress caused by the mental labour of preparing for, executing, or recovering from a service interaction. Includes masking, scripting, over-preparing, self-monitoring, and post-encounter spirals.

Cognitive Layering Distress

When too many thoughts, requirements, or demands are layered — forms, letters, transport planning, phone anxiety, benefit deadlines. Eventually the system becomes unmanageable and is abandoned.

Perception-Based Distress

The distress caused by being disbelieved, challenged, or excluded due to an invisible condition or a mismatch between how you present and how others think disability should look.

The Unseen Barriers Framework is an original conceptual model grounded in lived experience, field observation and desk-based research conducted by Shaun Gray. This work was developed as part of his academic dissertation and now underpins the entire mission of The Unseen Barriers Foundation. The framework offers a new theoretical language for understanding exclusion, one rooted in distress, sensory interference, emotional overwhelm and disbelief, rather than traditional architectural or procedural barriers.

It is not a diagnostic tool. It is a conceptual intervention. We do not claim to assess impairments, nor to replicate any existing schema of disability. This is a third wave disability theory grounded in complexity, emotion and systemic neglect. It articulates the gaps that rights-based approaches have often failed to name. These are the unspoken causes of missed appointments, avoidance, masking and refusal. The choice not to engage that is not a choice at all.

The framework currently identifies four core barriers, each one understood as a form of distress-based exclusion. They operate across both individual and systemic levels, and while each can be experienced independently, they often co-occur and compound. They are:

Communication Management Distress

This barrier describes the overwhelm and anticipatory anxiety caused by the effort of managing, preparing for or recovering from communication, especially when the stakes are high or support is needed. It includes fear of not being believed, emotional exhaustion, and the cumulative toll of telling and retelling your story. Many people disengage not because they lack the will, but because the burden of performing the right narrative is too heavy.

• Avoidance of calls, emails or appointments due to dread or shame
• The compulsion to mask or curate tone to appear credible
• Exhaustion after every professional interaction
• Shutdown in response to inaccessible or unsympathetic language

We do not treat this as a behavioural problem. We recognise it as a form of trauma response to disbelief, institutional gatekeeping and the exhaustion of self-advocacy.

Scent Distress

Scent Distress is one of the most overlooked forms of sensory barrier. It describes the way certain smells, whether linked to trauma, food insecurity, or sensory sensitivity, can overwhelm, distract or distress individuals to the point of functional disengagement. Hunger can sharpen scent perception. So can anxiety. So can neurodivergence.

• Nausea or shutdown triggered by institutional odours (e.g. bleach, sweat, stale air)
• Emotional collapse due to trauma-linked smells (e.g. aftershave, hospital disinfectant)
• Difficulty accessing food spaces due to overwhelming scent cues
• The impact of hunger on olfactory sensitivity and distress

Scent Distress is not simply a dislike of smells. It is a valid accessibility need that most services have failed to recognise or accommodate. We name it because naming it is the first act of legitimacy.

Perception-Based Distress

This barrier captures the anticipatory dread and internalised shame caused by how others may perceive you, especially when your disability is invisible or contested. It includes the fear of being challenged, disbelieved or invalidated, both by professionals and by other disabled people.

• Avoiding access queues or services for fear of being accused of faking
• Shame about needing support despite looking fine
• Surveillance and judgement from others within access spaces
• A deep-rooted feeling of illegitimacy, especially in neurodivergent or fluctuating conditions

Perception-Based Distress destroys confidence, isolates individuals and fosters distrust in systems meant to help. When service users say it’s just easier not to go, this is often why.

Cognitive Layering Distress

Cognitive Layering Distress refers to the mental stacking of unprocessed trauma, demands and emotional residue, which compromises executive function and engagement. It is the weight of everything unspoken, everything carried. This barrier is not about capacity in the clinical sense. It is about cognitive overload as a form of lived experience.

• Inability to initiate tasks due to mental congestion
• Forgetting appointments or messages despite care and intention
• Losing speech or decision-making ability under emotional strain
• Internal collapse under the sheer volume of needs, forms, fears and expectations

This is often mistaken as disorganisation, irresponsibility or apathy. But at its core, Cognitive Layering Distress is an expression of lived overload. It is the distress of holding too much, for too long, with too little recognition.

A New Lexicon of Access

The Unseen Barriers Framework does not seek to replace existing access models. It seeks to complete them. To name what is still unnamed. To validate the stories that have too often been dismissed as excuses or pathology.

It gives organisations, professionals and policymakers a new lexicon of access, one that starts from distress, not convenience. One that centres complexity instead of flattening difference. And one that demands we look again at everything we thought we knew about hard to reach communities.

Because maybe we were never hard to reach. Maybe you just weren’t looking in the right direction.