12 Disability-Friendly University Principles
- Actively encourage participation in all core activities of the university, including education, research, practical, and social arenas.
- Promote personal and career development that advantages the person’s skills.
- Recognize the range of educational and learning styles of those with varying types of disabilities.
- Promote interaction among those with and without disabilities to facilitate reciprocal sharing and learning.
- Develop and maintain diverse options for ways to participate in university activities.
- Ensure that the university’s research agendas reflect and include those with disabilities at all levels of the research.
- Promote public discourse about disability as part of all DEI activities.
- Underscore the advantages of including those with disabilities in increasing complexity and richness of learning activities.
- Include health and wellness as a core tenet of the university, knowing that these are not the same for everyone.
- Facilitate disability community within and across campuses.
- Be cognizant of disability issues in all activities of the university without those with disabilities having to be at every table.
- Do not assume ‘typicality’ as the standard.
Levesque et al. identify five dimensions of accessibility. To be accessible, services
must be:
- approachable
- acceptable
- available
- affordable
- appropriate
If all of these features are not in place, then a service is not accessible. Thus, adapting or adding disability modifications to a service that is not fundamentally accessible is unlikely to create access. Each of the five dimensions mentioned above must be in place before
minor modifications are made.
Reference: Levesque, J., Harris, M. F., & Russell, G. (2013). Patient-centred access to health care:
Conceptualising access at the interface of health systems and populations. International
Journal for Equity in Health, 12(1), 171–182.