L’accessibilité, ça s’enseigne

Universities have worked hard to make their campuses accessible. Ramps, captioning, alternative-format materials, accommodation offices — these matter, and the effort behind them is real. But accessibility on campus is only half of what a university owes. The other half is what it teaches. 

Universities educate the people who will design our buildings, deliver our public services, develop our technology and interpret our rights. What those graduates understand about disability before they ever enter professional practice shapes whether the systems they go on to build include people or exclude them. A campus can be fully accessible and still send graduates into the world who have never been taught to recognize a barrier, let alone prevent one. 

Consider law, the profession I know best. In Canada, the Federation of Law Societies’ National Requirement defines what every law degree must contain. It mandates competencies and subject areas: foundations of Canadian law, constitutional law, criminal law, administrative law, and professional ethics. Disability and accessibility are nowhere to be found among them. Whether a law graduate learns how disability shapes access to justice is left entirely to chance: to which school they attended, and which electives they happened to choose. 

This is not a hypothetical gap. Lawyers draft contracts, advise institutions and argue cases that determine whether people with disabilities can participate in public life. A lawyer who has never considered how a hearing, a form, or a courtroom can exclude someone is not equipped to notice when it does. 

The profession has shown it can close gaps like this when it decides they matter. In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, law societies across several provinces introduced Indigenous cultural competency requirements, and some law schools made courses on Indigenous peoples and the law mandatory for graduation. That effort has not been without debate about how such requirements should be designed and imposed. But the underlying principle is sound and transferable: when a body of knowledge is essential to serving the public fairly, leaving it to chance is not enough. Disability belongs in that same conversation. 

Law is only one example. The same gap runs through professional education more broadly, and public policy shows it plainly. A public-policy graduate will go on to design eligibility rules, application processes and program criteria that decide who receives support and who is turned away. If that graduate was never taught to ask how a rule might exclude someone, e.g., an income test that ignores the costs of disability, an online-only application that assumes a certain kind of user, a deadline that cannot accommodate a person navigating multiple systems, the exclusion will be built in quietly, and no one will have intended it. Barriers are rarely the product of ill will. They are far more often the product of not having been taught to look. 

Technology tells the same story. A software developer who was never taught accessibility will ship a service that a screen-reader user cannot navigate, not out of indifference, but because the question never arose in their training. Across disciplines, the pattern holds: professionals build what they were taught to build, and they overlook what they were never taught to see. 

So what should universities do? The answer is not another optional elective, tucked into a corner of the calendar for the handful of students already interested. It is to embed disability knowledge into core professional learning, into the required curriculum, where every future lawyer, policymaker, engineer and clinician encounters it, and to make it practical rather than abstract. Students should learn not only that barriers exist, but also how to identify them, design around them, and test whether a system actually works for the people most likely to be excluded. 

And it should be taught with the involvement of educators and experts with disabilities. The disability community’s oldest principle is “nothing about us without us,” and it applies to the classroom as much as anywhere else. Disability knowledge taught without disabled voices risks reproducing the very distance it is meant to close. 

None of this diminishes the accessible campus. A student who cannot get into the building, or follow the lecture, or read the materials, is owed those accommodations as a matter of right, and universities should keep improving them. But accommodation and education are different responsibilities. One ensures that students with disabilities can be present. The other ensures that all students leave prepared to build a world that includes them. 

Universities like to speak of graduating people who will change the world. The measure of that promise is not only whether the campus was accessible while they studied. It is whether they carry, into every institution they go on to shape, the ability to recognize a barrier and the knowledge to prevent it. 

That is a responsibility no ramp can meet.