During our visit today, we learned about Queen Margaret University’s disability services, specifically their new focus on accessible technology and the changes that they are proposing to make technology more user-friendly for people with intellectual disabilities. This was a topic that I briefly learned about during our country profile assignments. I studied Denmark, which is also beginning to focus on accessible technology. Whereas QMU is mainly addressing this relatively new topic from a student’s perspective by proposing changes to the schools webpages, appointment signups, and class attendance tracking, the limited literature I found from Denmark was approaching the topic more generally by proposing improvements to public news stations and government webpages with the inclusion of different subtitle options and webpage designs.
While doing my country assignment, I was interested to learn about Denmark’s initiatives because technology is such a large part of our current society and its inaccessibility leaves people with disabilities at a significant disadvantage both in their personal and professional lives. However, Denmark seemed to be in the early forms of planning and had not had any serious advances in implementation that I had found. Hearing from QMU about their use of ID badges, user friendly webpages and appointment signups, in addition to adaptive appointment reminders used by different therapists for people with intellectual disabilities illustrates that these changes can be made very easily and can have a great impact on students with and without disabilities. Hopefully, continued improvements in smaller settings such as QMU will spark improvements throughout society!
You made some really great points! I think other universities, even UMass has a long way to go before making things accessible for students. I liked how they also talked about removing students from the roster if class is too hard for them to attend and I have never heard about anything like that at UMass. I think that is a great tool because there are so many other ways for students to access the class material without being in class if it is not suited for them. Hopefully other universities will move in the same direction and realize that the students health is more important than being in a lecture hall.
The way that QMU is making their disability services as accessible as they can for the user is really great progress. When they showed us their webpage, I was pleasantly surprised because colleges in general (especially UMass) tend to have confusing websites that are not accessible for any of their students, let alone students that may need extra services. It is nice to see how QMU is actively trying to make the lives of people who need their disability services much easier.