Disability Justice vs. Access and Accessibility
The accommodations process within higher education is regulated by the government and connected to a medical diagnosis of disability.
Disability justice and accessibility are two connected but different approaches to addressing and transforming the conditions of ableism. While both approaches call for the inclusion of disabled people and the removal of barriers, they raise a different set of questions and strategies about how best to combat ableism.
Disability justice calls for the infrastructural, social, economic, and political transformation of our world—not just making accommodations for people who are excluded, but centring the way we design space, build community, and work together in a way that takes diverse forms of embodiment and neurodiversity as the core of organizing and design. Disability justice work often takes shape in the forms of social movement practices that challenge the idea that there is a “normal” body or “normal” cognition; instead, it sees the relational and constructed ways that we have built our world as inaccessible and exclusionary and celebrates bodily and cognitive diversity.
Disabled students regularly experience both overt and passive barriers when navigating education, including having their lives and experiences invalidated, being met with hostility or incredulity when requesting accommodations, having their demands and needs dismissed by institutions and individuals, holding more student loan debt, and having their right to education denied when faculty, staff, administrators, and peers refuse to make requests for accommodation and adaptation.
Disabled students are likely to have up to 60 percent more student debt by the time they graduate.
Further, students, faculty, and staff whose disabilities are rendered invisible (e.g. chronic pain, chronic illnesses, neurodivergence) are often dismissed, excluded, ignored, or invalidated in their experiences navigating higher education. The impact of microaggressions on disabled people within the education sector and the implicit barriers that can foreclose disabled people from even attempting to enrol in or seek careers in higher education have resulted in disproportionately low rates of disabled faculty and staff represented within institutionalized education. Due to this, universities and other post-secondary educational institutions continue to be predominantly ableist.
Students often face accessibility needs that are not recognized by institutional policies or face barriers when trying to access university services, such as medical assessment, stigmatization, and financial barriers. This means that a significant number of students would likely benefit from accommodations and/or universal and adaptive design approaches in their courses but cannot make official institutional requests for resources or support. The illegibility of disability beyond the medicalized model of diagnosis has been challenged by disabled people,