Disability Accommodations Process Consulting

One in five college students have a disability that affects the way they navigate their academic lives. At a large institution like the University of Michigan, it can be a challenge to create an accessible environment for these disabled students. Every disability requires different accommodations and presents a unique set of conditions that complicate the provision of those accommodations. The University of Michigan's Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) office helps students access the accommodations they require to thrive in higher education.

My team of user experience design graduate students, Team Sprint, were asked to consult about the disability accommodations process at SSD to discover pain points, reveal strengths of the current approach, and make recommendations for the future of accessibility accommodations at the University of Michigan.

To understand the full picture of the accommodations process, our team used a process called Qualitative Inquiry. This process focuses on synthesizing information from interviews to discover common themes, but also compares information gleaned from the interviews with a robust review of research literature to uncover new possibilities. This consulting process can uncover details that quantitative inquiry often misses, such as the attitudes, beliefs, and goals of each stakeholder.

Team Sprint conducted a set of formal interviews of stakeholders, including employees from the SSD, faculty professors, administrators at The Knox Center adaptive technology computing site, an instructional designer within Informational and Technology Services (ITS), and a digital information accessibility coordinator at the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE). Our team also collected testimonials from anonymized disabled students.

Instead of relying on how the accommodations process works on paper, we prompted our interviewees for anecdotes about their recent experiences. This aspect of Qualitative Inquiry helps cut through institutional myths to reveal the real problems and victories that stakeholders experience in their work.

After the interview process, my team analyzed the interview transcripts and extracted "tags" of individual findings, such as "The University does not offer disability verification services, so students must pursue their own medical visit to gain certification." Our team sorted through these findings to discover common themes and highlight shared pain points among the interviewees. These tags also helped us spot underutilized strengths in the support system for disabled students that would inform our recommendations.

Team Sprint's findings were that the disability accommodations process was too slow to meet the immediate needs of students, especially those grappling with disability for the first time. From the first time a student approaches SSD for assistance, it might be months of appointments, documentation, certification, and medical visits before they would begin to receive accommodations from professors. This unwieldy process, while compliant with all ADA laws, often meant that students would end up juggling more challenges in their lives for several months, which had the opposite of the desired effect of accessibility accommodations that are supposed to help students thrive.

The end result of the accommodations process was a set of letters for students to present to their professors requesting specific modifications to course processes, such as extra time on exams for students with ADHD. Since professors have tenure (and lots of power) these letters are purely advisory, which makes the extensive verification process students go through feel frustrating and arbitrary.

Team Sprint produced a list of recommendations to improve the provision of accommodations to disabled students. Our primary recommendation was to cut through the formal verification process to get students the support they need immediately. We drafted a interim accommodation letter that would informally request accommodations from professors the same day as a student first petitions aid from SSD. The interim accommodation letter would inform the professor that the student is pursuing verification of their disability and that they request accommodations in good faith. Since even the formal requests are ultimately optional for professors to implement, these informal letters offer similar results.

Our team also uncovered issues related to understaffing at SSD. Comparing the disability offices at Big 10 universities, University of Michigan had just half as many disability coordinators as its peers. Using this type of inter-university benchmarking data, we were able to construct a compelling argument for additional funding for SSD.

These two findings have been utilized and implemented by SSD. Students that walk in seeking help for their disabilities are able to receive interim letters immediately to receive aid, and SSD has used our research to petition for additional funding. These changes will make the University of Michigan pursue its goals of being an institution at which all students can thrive, regardless of disability status.