Scoping Review - Physical Accessibility & Post-secondary Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background:Statistics Canada (2006) reports mobility impairments account for the largest proportion of disabilities experienced by students.Although accessibility standards exist for the physical design of built environments, universities and colleges are frequently cited as inaccessible.It is imperative to determine physical accessibility as research shows that successful involvement in post-secondary education leads to a more productive life and improved vocational options (Christ & Stodden, 2005).The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) can provide a useful framework to categorize the barriers and facilitators to physical accessibility that affect participation in education. Purpose:The aim of this research was to examine the evidence on the physical accessibility of post-secondary schools for students with mobility impairments and provide an overview of the barriers and facilitators. Methods:A scoping review was conducted to determine the breadth and depth of the evidence available.The primary search terms were "accessibility", "school" and "mobility impairment."Only sources written in English after 1990 were included, as the first major accessibility legislation was enacted in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act.The databases searched were OvidMedline, CINAHL, Pubmed, Scopus, ProQuest, CBCA Education, ERIC, Engineering Village, PyscInfo, SocINDEX, and Google.Following a systematic screen of title, abstract and full-text relevancy, 49 articles were included for review.The ICF categories of Products and Technology and Natural Environment and Human-Made Changes to Environments were used to organize data extraction.Frequency of cited barriers and facilitators within these categories were recorded and presented in chart and paragraph form.Findings: The literature demonstrated that most barriers fell in the ICF categories of Design, Construction and Building Products and Technology for Gaining Access to Facilities Inside Buildings for Public Use (n=83) and Design, Construction and Building Products and Technology for Entering and Exiting Buildings for Public Use (n=56).These categories also presented the most facilitators (n=67 and n=37, respectively).Other barriers and facilitators were related to Products and Technology for Personal Indoor and Outdoor Mobility and Transportation; Products and Technology for Way Finding, Path Routing and Designation of Locations in Buildings for Public Use; Products and Technology for Gaining Access to Facilities in Buildings for Private Use; Products and Technology of Urban Land Development; Land Forms; Population Density; and Precipitation. Implications:Barriers to accessibility pose substantial problems, as barriers were mentioned more frequently than facilitators.To overcome barriers, the necessary changes required expensive architectural adaptations, such as installing elevators.Conversely, facilitators required less costly modifications, such as enlarging designated parking spaces.This research, combined with knowledge of accessibility legislation and human functioning, can help to support participation and raise awareness of occupational injustices related to accessing education.Future research could help determine funding and resource allocation priorities for constructing accessible environments.Future directions for stakeholders should include enforcing accessibility legislation, engaging in knowledge translation, and advocating for disability rights.Limitations of the study were exclusion of visual and hearing impairments, exclusion of non-English literature, possibility of overlooking search terms used in other countries, and not assessing the quality of the literature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.023 | 0.032 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".