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Departmental Accessibility Resource Coordinators

The ACCESS-ed Project is developing, infusing, and testing a process to deliver a campus infrastructure that can self-sustain a universal design (UD) environment that will benefit all students. Universal design in the realm of higher education includes the instructional element, information media, and the entire campus physical environment. To achieve the goal of transitioning a campus to an emphasis on universal design to meet the needs of all students, especially students with disabilities or other special needs, a multifaceted change process in the form of a campus DARC strategy favors a combined bottom-up and top-down approach to the dissemination of the ideas, information, and UD strategies. A Departmental Accessibility Resource Coordinator (DARC) network requires a manager or management team and a steering committee on each participating campus.  With guidelines developed by the ACCESS-ed staff, the manager(s) and/or steering committee facilitate the development of the DARC network.

Goals and Objectives for the Departmental Accessibility Resource Coordinator (DARC)

  1. To promote an accessible campus climate environment for all students, other consumers and staff with disabilities.
  2. To facilitate a support system approach toward universal design concepts in education/instruction.
  3. To promote universal design concepts in education/instruction within departmental structures.

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