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Learn About
Universal
Design in
Education

The A3 Conceptual Framework: Advocacy, Accommodation and Accessibility and its Caveat

In the About ACCESS-ed section of the ACCESS-ed website we briefly describe the A3 model. This A3 Model is a foundation for the conceptualization of UDE institutional change on campuses. 

The sequence of 1) Advocacy, 2) Accommodation, and 3) Accessibility provides a nice basis for the ‘A3 Model’ and we use this in our basic training about UDE and how organizations have tended to meet the needs of people with disabilities. However, we recognize that  ‘Advocacy’ and ‘Accommodation’ are technically intervention approaches. ‘Accessibility’, on the other hand, is a goal or an outcome, not an intervention. More pure headings for the A3 model might read Advocacy, Accommodation and Universal Design (an approach to accessibility). Thus, in light of the previous discussion regarding UD terminology, we offer this small caveat to the the use of the A3 Model.

It took me several years of struggling with the heavy door to my building, sometimes having to wait until a person stronger came along, to realize that the door was an accessibility problem, not only for me, but for others as well. And I did not notice, until one of my students pointed it out, that the lack of signs that could be read from a distance at my university forced people with mobility impairments to expend a lot of energy unnecessarily, searching for rooms and offices. Although I have encountered this difficulty myself on days when walking was exhausting to me, I interpreted it, automatically, as a problem arising from my illness (as I did with the door), rather than as a problem arising from the built environment having been created for too narrow a range of people and situations.

Susan Wendell, author of
The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability