Being disabled is hard. That’s no news. However, understanding the complexity of disabled people’s experiences is equally challenging, if not more so. The reason behind this is how disability is perceived individually and in groups. For example, one person may be pleased to inform someone that they “have autism”, whereas others would prefer to say they “are autistic”. This difference in phrasing infers that some people see autism as a part of them, while others perceive it as separate.

Equally, in physical disability, there are preferences between capitalising “Disabled” to frame their condition as a salient part of their identity or leaving it without capitalisation to emphasise the person and not the condition.

This is why, together with Dr Louisa Peters, Lecturer in Psychology and Dr James Jackson, Reader in Psychology at Leeds Trinity University, I have started to collect data for a research project investigating disabled students’ experiences at Leeds Trinity University.

As universities have increasingly adopted corporate management models, such as key performance indicators surrounding overall academic grade percentages and the management of artificial intelligence (AI) utilisation, disabled people have been increasingly deprioritised. I would suggest this is not intentional; most universities have well-grounded models of supporting disabled students in many ways. However, with emerging technologies such as AI, higher education (HE) policy requires rapid amendment at speeds that match AI's capabilities and seemingly exponentially growing power. Herein lies a problem.

Attending a recent disability activism conference, one of the keynote speeches suggested that people face the greatest issues when a barrier to their education is arbitrary, such as making an aesthetic design choice for a poster which is difficult for dyslexic students.  Hearing this sentiment made me even more aware of the importance of allowing different voices to shape their experiences at university. For example, a podcast as a learning method might be accessible for a person with visual impairments, whereas a person with a speech impairment would find this accommodation much harder.

This example elucidates how disabled students' experiences are nebulous and individualistic. Continuous, high-quality research into disabled students is a valuable topic for both HE institutions and their students. The example also forms the basis for our research: What are the most arbitrary elements of higher education that are impacting disabled students’ experiences of higher education, and how can we work to make them more suitable and accommodating?

I am excited to work on this research and look forward to providing insight and recommendations in due course. Disabled students at Leeds Trinity can have their say on accessibility by sharing their views with our research team through an online study.

For further information, please contact the lead researcher, Dr Louisa Peters, at [email protected]

Deano Lund is an Undergraduate Research Assistant at Leeds Trinity University.