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Why Does School Feel Harder Than It Needs To? Rethinking Accessibility Beyond Accommodations
I started thinking about accessibility through a question that sounds almost too simple:
Why does school sometimes feel harder than it needs to be?
Not harder because the material is difficult. That part is supposed to be challenging. I mean
harder in a different way: when the slides are difficult to find, the PDF cannot be searched, the
course site feels like a maze, or the lecture video has no captions.
For some students, these are small annoyances.
For others, they are not small at all.
Through my recent research on accessibility in Canadian post-secondary education, I began to
see accessibility less as a “support service” and more as a design question. Too often, learning
environments are built first, and accessibility is added later, usually after someone has already
struggled enough to ask for help.
Accommodations matter. They help many students, and they should exist.
But there is something worth noticing: if a student must first struggle, disclose, document, and
explain before they can fully participate, then access is not really built into the system. It is
something they have to negotiate.
That changes the question.
Instead of asking, “Who needs special help?” maybe we should ask, “Who was this system
quietly designed around?”
Because many barriers do not look dramatic. They look ordinary. A confusing course page. A
rigid participation rule. A timed assessment that measures panic as much as understanding. A
PDF that technically exists, but is not actually usable.
Captions, searchable documents, clear course sites, flexible participation formats, and wellstructured materials do not lower academic standards. They remove unnecessary friction so students can show what they actually know.
Accessibility is not about making education easier.
It is about making education more honest.
I created a short video as part of this research to explore these questions further:
Good education should not be designed for an imagined “normal” student.
It should be designed for real students, with real bodies, real brains, real lives, and real limits
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