Accessibility and Students with Disabilities

Team Members: Catherine S. Fichten (leader), Rhonda Amsel, Phil Abrami, Richard Schmid, Maria Barile, Jennison Asuncion, Alice Havel, Shirley Jorgensen, and Rajesh Malik.

   Our theme examines ways to improve accessibility and academic success for students with various disabilities in higher education. We believe that attention to obstacles and facilitators to accessible learning - such as the quality of educational materials and learning conditions - will lead to a greater sensitivity to the needs of all learners. Furthermore, considering the growing percentage of postsecondary students who have some form of disability (visual, hearing, neurological, mobility, psychiatric, learning, health, etc.), universal instructional design has never been more critical. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to significantly enhance accessibility for students: we have found that postsecondary students with disabilities can effectively make use of ICTs and that they succeed and graduate at the same rate as their non-disabled peers. A large part of our undertaking is, therefore, to communicate this potential to the various stakeholders.

   Using bilingual questionnaires, archival and qualitative research methods, structured interviews, and focus groups, we have developed appropriate and accessible testing instruments for collecting and analyzing user data. Once we analyze the findings we disseminate these to end-users: educators, students, campus disability service providers, policy-makers, faculty, and others. In the past year we have been busy with an ongoing study, funded by PAREA, of standardized college exit grades of graduates with and without disabilities; we are examining the relationship between exit grades and perceived academic obstacles and facilitators. With the help of the Canadian Council on Learning, we have also completed a study of the accessibility of ICTs involving over 1000 Canadian college and university students with disabilities.

   Two of our team's students, Natalie Martiniello and Jill Budd received McGraw-Hill Ryerson Scholarships in connection with their work in our summer internship program. Martiniello was accompanied by her guide dog, Sherby. Although Sherby did not receive a scholarship, nevertheless, she was a valuable honorary Adaptech Research Network member.

   We have, of course, been actively presenting at scholarly conferences and publishing in both scholarly journals as well as in newsletters for students, professors, and members of the disability community. Our students are co-authors on most of these. The Adaptech Research Network has grown substantially during the past year and now includes active team members not only from Concordia and McGill Universities but also from the University of Northern British Columbia and the Open University of Israel, as well as from several francophone Québec colleges. In addition, we have just received three new grants (from SSHRC, FQRSC, and PAREA) to continue our research program, with a continuing emphasis on student success and on information and communication technologies. Because we also received funding from Services Canada for two summer students we will be able not only to continue the research but also to update and revamp our bilingual web site www.adaptech.org to make it even more informative and user friendly.