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Welcome!

ACCESS-ed offers the entire higher education community quick and easy solutions to challenges they may face when creating an inclusive campus.

The ACCESS-ed Website presents products and resources for universal design on post-secondary campuses. In addition to our own products, the website includes universal design resources from other available sources to provide you with a comprehensive array of information and resources.

An emphasis of the website is dissemination of universal design information on campuses, particularly through unique campus networks of DARCs (Departmental Accessibility Resource Coordinators). A how-to manual is available on the ACCESS-ed Website for campuses to replicate the DARC system and adapt it to their unique circumstances.

One of the focus areas of the R2D2 Center, where the ACCESS-ed Website and the UD ITEACH Project are based, is measurement. The R2D2 Center philosophy states that good assessments help identity and clarify needs, diagnose exact problems and set the stage for better design. Thus, evaluation tools become important change agents. Tools, such as the AUDITs, have been developed with attention to measurement of campus accessibility as a strategy to improve the education of students with disabilities, in particular, and consequently for everyone on campus, be they student, staff, or other consumer. We believe that

“Design Including People with Disabilities is Better Design for Everyone.”

Let us know what you think! We are always interested in your feedback regarding our website and the available resources, so please register with us and make use of the “comments” feature to comment on specific resources. Please utilize our Feedback Form or our contact information to inform us of any issues with the website; to let us know how you found the site helpful to your work; or to suggest new resources for development, or other great resources you know of for promoting the universal design of campuses.

Thanks for visiting the ACCESS-ed Website!

Tools and Resources

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