Accessible Communication and Materials in Higher Education

Abstract

Students with disabilities face numerous access barriers in higher education institutions. For example, many students struggle to receive the accommodations that they legally have a right to, and many course materials and tools are inaccessible (e.g., textbooks, required software, slide decks). Consequently, students with disabilities drop out of college at a higher rate than nondisabled students. In this dissertation, I aim to improve two core areas of inaccessibility for students with disabilities. First, I will learn about the common issues that arise when three stakeholders (disabled students, professors, and people working in disability service offices) work to fulfill technology-focused accommodations (e.g., slides, IDEs, lecture videos) for a student. Through this two part survey and interview/co-design study, I will develop design recommendations around how technology can better support this process. Second, I will apply techniques like optimization and natural language processing to build tools to identify and automatically repair common accessibility issues in a ubiquitous tool for teaching across departments: slide show presentations. By conducting this work, I will contribute software tools and design recommendations that will support disabled students in obtaining an accessible education.