Maintaining the Accessibility Ecosystem: a Multi-Stakeholder Analysis of Accessibility in Higher Education

Abstract

People with disabilities face extra hardship in institutions of higher education because of accessibility barriers built into the educational system. While prior work investigates the needs of individual stakeholders, this work offers insights into the communication and collaboration between key stakeholders in creating access in institutions of higher education. The authors present reflections from their experiences working with disability service offices to meet their access needs and the results from interviewing 6 professors and 6 other disabled students about their experience in achieving access. Our results indicate that there are rich opportunities for technological solutions to support these stakeholders in communicating about and creating access.