Maintaining the Accessibility Ecosystem: a Multi-Stakeholder Analysis of Accessibility in Higher Education
Kelly Avery Mack, Natasha A. Sidik, Aashaka Desai, Emma J. McDonnell, Kunal Mehta, Christina Zhang, Jennifer Mankoff · 2023 · Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '23) · doi:10.1145/3597638.3614547
Summary
This short paper examines how accessibility is created and maintained in higher education through the interactions of three key stakeholder groups: disabled students, professors, and disability service (DS) offices. The author team—comprising disabled students and faculty members with access needs across seven institutions—used a mixed-method approach combining autoethnographic reflections from their own experiences with semi-structured interviews of 6 professors and 6 disabled students at a large public university. The autoethnographic data is presented through three composite vignettes representing distinct experiences: Silas, an international student with a visual disability who uses screen readers and navigates inaccessible PDFs; Flora, a graduate student with fluctuating health needs requiring captions, flexible scheduling, and remote options; and Petra, a disabled professor who has interacted with disability services across four institutions over three decades. These vignettes illustrate how accessibility in higher education is not a simple, one-time provision but an ongoing, labor-intensive process of negotiation, communication, and relationship-building across multiple stakeholders. The broader interviews with students and professors confirmed these patterns, revealing systemic issues in how accommodations are requested, communicated, and implemented.
Key findings
The study identified seven interconnected themes characterizing accessibility breakdowns in higher education. Access requires significant advance preparation from professors, who must coordinate with captioners, interpreters, and DS offices while ensuring materials and classrooms are accessible—work that multiple professors found overwhelming. Communication timelines are fundamentally misaligned: DS offices ask students to register early, but may only notify professors a week before classes start, while professors report not knowing what they are teaching 48 hours before class. Lack of transparency across the accommodation chain means information gets lost—DS emails end up in spam folders, captioners fail to make contact, and students have no visibility into request status. Students bear disproportionate labor in initiating and following up on accommodations, leading to fatigue and disengagement. Mistrust builds when DS offices fail to follow through, professors question whether accommodations are "really needed," and institutions break promises. The most successful accommodations occurred when stakeholders went beyond minimum DS provisions, using personal relationships to anticipate and flexibly adjust access solutions. Both formal and informal networks were essential for navigating the system.
Relevance
This paper reframes accessibility in higher education as an ecosystem problem rather than an individual accommodation issue, with direct implications for technology design and institutional policy. The communication breakdowns documented—lost emails, misaligned timelines, opaque request tracking—represent concrete opportunities for centralized accessibility coordination tools that could improve transparency and reduce the labor burden on disabled students. For accessibility practitioners in educational technology, the findings highlight that course materials (especially PDFs) remain a persistent barrier, and that tools supporting proactive accessibility checking and accommodation tracking could significantly improve outcomes. The emphasis on relationship-building as a workaround for systemic failures suggests that technology should facilitate rather than replace human connections between stakeholders. The autoethnographic methodology, with several authors writing from their own lived experience of disability, centers disabled perspectives in a field that too often treats disability as an external problem to be solved.
Tags: higher education · accommodations · disability services · accessibility barriers · organizational accessibility · stakeholder communication · autoethnography
Standards referenced: ADA · Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act