Assessing the Needs of Students with Disabilities at the University of Washington

USER RESEARCH

As part of my work towards my master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction + Design at the University of Washington, I worked with a few of my colleagues to conduct user research on the experiences of students with disabilities in higher education, specifically at the UW.

Why Accessibility in Higher Education?

I was interested in conducting research within the very broad topic of education. Our discussion as a team of four helped narrow our scope to the topic of accessibility within education.

I knew we still needed to narrow our field of focus from there, and we decided that, since we were conducting this research on the University of Washington campus, we’d have the best access to other university students (both graduate and undergraduate). Focusing on that group would allow us to gather the best data we could in the time frame we were given and with the resources we had at our disposal.

Picking a relevant and current topic to research might also mean that our research would be useful beyond the scope of class assignments.

Though the Americans with Disabilities Act guarantees reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities, many still face substantial accessibility barriers in higher education. I was interested in studying the accessibility issues students with disabilities face at the University of Washington.

Collective Insights

Students with disabilities have an inequitable experience in higher education, even as institutions work to accommodate them.

Acquiring accommodations from DRS (Disability Resources for Students) is so inefficient that some accommodations arrive too late.

Students with disabilities take on an extra burden of work just to find the resources they need to participate in higher education.

Process

Desk Research

  • Literature review

  • Thematic analysis of the lived experiences of people with disabilities in academia

  • I performed SWOT and benchmarking analyses on disability accessibility in higher education.

Generative Study

Conducted 4 semi-structured interviews with UW students with disabilities. My team then analyzed the data from each interview and affinitized our collective codes to distill insights about students’ experiences navigating their education at UW.

Evaluative Study

From there, we decided to focus on creating a centralized digital space for UW students to share resources and help each other feel supported. We conducted cognitive walkthroughs of our app prototype with current and former university students to get a sense of the effectiveness of this first iteration of our solution.

Summative Report

My team reviewed key findings and insights from our three phases of research to identify consistent themes and to define recommendations and next steps.

Next Steps

The next phase of this project will focus on further developing and refining the prototype to create a fully functional solution that improves accessibility in higher education. Our proposed next steps include:

  1. Presenting our research findings to stakeholders within university administration

  2. Refining the low-fidelity prototype for clarity and improving information architecture

  3. Conducting a second cognitive walkthrough of the improved prototype

  4. Developing the high-fidelity prototype based on user feedback from the second round of testing

Desk Research

Problem Space and Research Question

My team’s desk research gave us much-needed context and a foundation to focus in on our topic.

We chose a research question that would guide us towards understanding the scope of our topic and what might be the major issues facing students with disabilities in higher education.

What are the major accessibility issues in higher education?

Methods & Rationale

Using the UW libraries’ database and Google Search, I found resources summarizing the lived experiences of people with disabilities in academia and recommending practices for accessible higher education. We compiled these and the rest of my team’s findings into a literature review, then identified common themes across sources.

I summarized my perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) to accessibility in higher education based on the literature I reviewed. My teammates did the same. We then synthesized these reports as a team and created a benchmarking analysis of the current state of accessibility in higher education.

We chose these methods because we were not analyzing a particular product, so competitive and heuristic analyses did not apply.

Desk Research Findings

  1. A call for Universal Design to be used across campuses, in both physical and digital spaces

  2. A key element of Universal Design is having people with disabilities in the room, actively designing and part of the process

  3. Audits and surveys for safety on campuses, and regular updates are needed to make sure accessibility is addressed on a regular basis

  4. Faculty experience with providing accommodations varies and they often have to rely on their community to find resources and adapt their teaching.

  5. Even with accommodations, issues continue to marginalize people with disabilities in academia.

These findings suggest that there are major gaps in the resources that are available to students, which creates barriers to equitable educational experiences.

Next, my team sought out current and recently graduated students at UW who could tell us firsthand about their experience navigating campus with a disability.

I hoped to discover a number of things, including:

  • Whether our secondary research findings would line up with firsthand accounts from current and recently graduated students

  • What other accessibility problems or insights we would find from interviewing students

  • What the current state of accessibility accommodations is for UW specifically

Generative Research

Objectives

After completing our secondary research, I wanted to investigate how our initial findings would align (or not) with experiences of students at UW. My team’s objective was to identify and understand the major accessibility issues students face in digital and/or physical spaces at the University of Washington.

I guided my team to put together these key research questions to shape our generative study:

  1. What accessibility barriers do students with disabilities face at UW?

  2. What accommodations are needed for students with disabilities in digital/physical spaces?

  3. What are common frustrations students face when pursuing accommodations?

  4. How are students’ accommodation needs tracked across classes, quarters, or years?

  5. How well do accommodations meet student needs?

  6. How can we intervene or change current systems in a way that  would make UW a more inclusive environment for students with disabilities?

  7. How do accessibility barriers on campus impact students’ emotional well-being and sense of belonging?

Methods & Rationale

To study the experiences of students with disabilities at UW, my group chose semi-structured interviews. 

We chose the semi-structured interview method to gather qualitative insights into the lived experiences of students at UW. I also believed that conducting interviews rather than surveys would yield more detailed information from our interviewees about their experiences, attitudes, and behaviors.

I felt that semi-structured interviews have the most potential to provide a lot of information within a relatively short period of time, compared to our other options. If we had more time available to us, we would have followed the semi-structured interviews with a survey to gather some more qualitative data and dig deeper into our findings from the interviews.

Semi-Structured Interviews

We conducted 60-minute semi-structured interviews with 4 UW students with disabilities. The research goal was to understand their experiences navigating higher education at UW and identify accessibility issues.

The common themes that emerged were:

  • Getting accommodations from professors and departments

  • Finding community / support from peers

  • Working with DRS is often very slow

  • A desire for accessibility orientation or educational resources for all students

  • Types of assistive technology available

  • Experiences of students with “invisible” disabilities

Generative Research Insights

I guided my team through a discussion of our findings that led us to these insights:

Accessibility resources are so difficult for students to find that it creates a barrier to an equitable university experience.

Acquiring accommodations from DRS is so inefficient that some accommodations arrive too late.

Students with disabilities take on an extra burden of work and stress in order to pursue necessary accommodations.

All of these insights showed us that there are a number of issues with students being able to find and receive accommodations in a timely manner. My team and I set out to address this in our next steps.

Low-Fidelity Prototype

We heard from multiple people that finding accessibility resources on and off-campus was a struggle for a variety of reasons, and that this struggle could be isolating for students.

My team created a preliminary version of an online community platform where students can share their accessibility challenges and the workarounds and resources they find and create on campus.

As one of the designers on my team, I was able to help create a low-fi prototype in Figma that we used for our next phase of research. I was also able to share my knowledge of creating clickable prototypes with teammates who were less familiar with the process.

Evaluative Research

In the generative research phase, we heard from multiple participants that finding accessibility resources on and off-campus was a struggle for a variety of reasons, and that this struggle could be isolating and frustrating. 

To address this, we identified some key objectives:

  1. We will develop a community platform where people can share their accessibility challenges and the workarounds/resources they find and create on campus. There will also be an AI feature that predicts future accessibility needs based on the information available within the platform, and can recommend possible solutions to these needs as they arise.

  2. We will discover the successes and areas of potential improvement in our prototype so that we can make edits and improvements for the next round of user testing.

  3. We will gather information about the needs of our users within the framework of the product/system we are designing.

Methods & Rationale

For this portion of the research process, we ran 5 cognitive walkthroughs to test our low fidelity prototype. Virtual studies allowed us to gain insight on the participants’ thoughts, feelings, and intuitions about each screen of our prototype before continuing with the task. 

Each participant was given 4 tasks in relation to the 4 main interactions of our solution:

  • Resource sharing

  • Ask + answer forum

  • AI question feature

  • Notification center

Cognitive walkthroughs also allowed us to gain initial feedback on general flows and information architecture that my team assumed would be intuitive and easy for participants to navigate. We were also able to see features and flows that our users really liked and what they wished to see. 

Cognitive Walkthroughs

We tested our prototype with 5 current or recently graduated students. Four were UW-affiliated and one was from another large public university.

At least two of these participants were UW community members with disabilities.

I hope that this resource will be useful to all students, with and without disabilities, so we tested it on a range of current and recently graduated university students who fit that description.

Evaluative Research Findings

Resources and answers to questions were not clearly organized or differentiated, which was confusing and unhelpful to users. The variety of information available was not clearly organized, making it difficult for users to understand where to go for help.

Participants wanted to see a search bar in the Ask + Answer page for easy access to specific threads and to check if their question has already been addressed.

Users did not initially trust the AI tool. Participants said AI answers to questions would be useful, but they wanted to verify the AI’s validity by checking where it was sourcing its information.

All of these initial findings showed me that our prototype needed some more refinement before the cognitive walkthroughs would tell us the information we needed about the usefulness of our tool. I set out to identify what we’d need to update before a second round of testing.

Next Steps

I would like to use our findings from our cognitive walkthrough to improve our low-fidelity prototype.

  • Add a search feature to the Ask + Answer page

  • Make copy edits and structural improvements to the information architecture to improve the clarity and usability of all features

  • Add a citation section to the AI-generated answers to questions

  • Edit notification hierarchy to reflect level of importance

Prototype Improvements

Second Cognitive Walkthrough

After finalizing a mid-fidelity prototype, I would do another cognitive walkthrough with UW community members to further test the concept, clarify which features are most useful, and experiment with alternative layouts.

Present to Stakeholders

After running further user tests on our second prototype, I would like to present our key findings and insights to our primary stakeholders in UW administration.

Citations

If you’re interested in taking a look at my full research report for this project, I’m happy to share! Get in touch here.