2025 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Formal accommodations in universities emerge from on campus disability resource centers with accommodations focused on notes, tests, flexibility with time, and space. Meeting students’ needs is invaluable to student success, and the burden of acquiring accommodations is on students. Acquiring formal accommodations poses barriers to disabled students such as paperwork, emotional energy, and the cost and time of proving a diagnosis. Even when accommodations are acquired, problems with the accommodations themselves continue to present barriers. These barriers hinder a disabled student’s success. The social definition of disability defines the environment as disabling, and for students, the classroom and administrative system can be disabling. This work focuses on disabled engineering students’ recommendations for accommodations in the classroom and the process for getting accommodations.

Participants for this study were recruited by flyers and department announcements at a Southwestern public university’s engineering school. Interested students completed a screening survey and those who identified as disabled, qualified. Ultimately, eleven interviews were conducted with a mix of students registered and not register for formal accommodations.

Registered students found some accommodations ineffective and unregistered students discussed the difficulty of acquiring accommodations. The problems students mentioned, when compounded, created a more significant barrier to their overall education. Complaints about accommodations mainly focused on the note taking and testing center accommodations. Students without accommodations mostly discussed how the process to get accommodations had too much paperwork, cost too much money, or required too much executive function. Most participants, if not all, supported recorded lectures like during the beginning pandemic, which has become less common.

Their discussions informed this paper’s recommendations that improve their access to classrooms, especially when implemented together. Recommendations include both instructor and administrative level added supports. Instructors should consider recording lectures, being more proactive on discussing and implementing accommodations, and giving clear expectations of course schedule. Administrative recommendations include reducing the paperwork for accommodations, improving mental health resources, improving reliability of the note taker accommodations, improving the testing center, and increasing professor responsibility for discussing accommodations.

Regardless of accommodation status, students faced barriers to access their education – some of these barriers were the same for those with and without accommodations, and others were very different. Instructors can use the insights gained from these interviews to develop awareness for accessibility in the classroom outside of formal accommodations, and be aware of how formal accommodations don’t remove all barriers.