Every modern democratic political theory assumes its citizens to hold certain rights. But rights are meaningless without the access to exercise them. This talk will explore what it means to take accessibility as central to all inquiry—inquiry spanning the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences—concerning humans as free, yet always socially-embedded organisms. Drawing upon research in disability studies over the last fifty-plus years, Joel M. Reynolds argues that (i) the foundational principle of all freedom-based social organization is accessibility and (ii) the value of human rights as a framework to ensure the freedom of individuals can only be realized through embodied rights.