Kareem Hassib was the Communications Assistant for the UDL Fellows Program as a 2024/25 Winter Session Work Learn student. Here, Kareem shares his reflections on the importance of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in providing equitable education in diverse learning environments—and outlines steps UBC has yet to take.
Reframing accessibility
As an able-bodied person, I, like many others, grew up thinking of accessibility as something separate from myself—important, but designed primarily to assist a specific, marginalized group. I saw accessibility as a form of charity or social obligation, much like paying taxes to build public roads and schools. While this perspective may have been well-intentioned, it was ultimately misguided. Accessibility is not about able-bodied people making personal sacrifices for others; it is about deconstructing environments built for only some and reconstructing environments that fit all.
Seeing disabilities as a deficiency on the part of someone living with a disability ignores the ways our institutions have been deficient in building environments that are optimized for people with different kinds of needs. A clear parallel exists in medicine, where many medications have historically been tested and dosed primarily for men, leading to suboptimal outcomes for women. The problem was never with women—it was with the systems around them. Likewise, left-handedness was seen as an inconvenience rather than a design failure before hands-on tools like scissors and lecture-hall desks were adapted for left-handed people. When it comes to teaching and learning at the university, many of our educational practices and environments were designed before accessibility became a major consideration, unfairly leading to worse outcomes for some students.
UDL is proactive, not reactive, in meeting student needs
UDL aims to improve education by designing pedagogical practices that support the diverse ways students perceive, process, and express information. It emphasizes offering multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression to make learning more accessible and inclusive. For example, providing content through visual, auditory, and hands-on methods ensures that all students can access and engage with the material in ways that align with their strengths, needs, and preferences. Teaching material across multiple modes accommodates different learners and reinforces understanding for all. The same goes for most accessible practices, which many see as benefiting only a specific group of people but really benefit everyone. For instance, closed captioning for video might be intended for those with auditory impairments, but it helps language learners, those who have trouble understanding different accents, etc. Likewise, alternative text for images might be intended for those with visual impairments, but it also helps provide context to all readers. In the same way that wheelchair ramps benefit those who walk with bicycles or carry wheeled objects like suitcases, teaching practices that incorporate UDL end up making learning easier for more people than one would initially expect.
By opening up learning through multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, and multiple means of action and expression, UDL takes the burdens off of students and meets students where they are at through building flexibility into the environment from the start. For instance, consider a lecture slide deck that relies heavily on green text. A student with red-green colourblindness now faces an awkward choice: struggle through the material, modify the slides themselves, or request changes from the instructor. A more accessible colour palette from the outset would have avoided this issue entirely. Similarly, assigning readings only in inaccessible PDF formats forces students who use screen readers to seek special accommodations. Providing accessible file formats or audio versions allows all students to engage with materials in the ways that work best for them.
UDL increases fairness and acknowledges student diversity
One of the ways I admire UDL is in its ability to increase fairness. For example, if you’re running an in-person course with no lecture recordings, students who have chronic illnesses or disabilities, or students from lower socio-economic backgrounds who have precarious work schedules or long commutes, may miss lectures because of their circumstances. While these students may have access to lecture slides, they’d still be missing out on in-class commentary from their professor, class discussions, and questions asked by their peers. All of these disadvantages could be eliminated by publishing lecture recordings, granting equitable access to knowledge for all learners.
Likewise, UDL increases fairness by acknowledging student diversity, because every student learns differently and is best at demonstrating their knowledge in different ways. Even something that seems straightforward, like exams, can be optimized with UDL. One should ask: are class assessments relying too much on one way of demonstrating knowledge? Some students might be great at demonstrating their competencies through a multiple-choice exam, while others might find essays with more creative freedom to better reflect their understanding, and others might be excellent at demonstrating learning through creating their own projects or case studies.
My perspective as a student leader and my experience working for the UDL Fellows Program
As a student advocate, Student Senator for the last two years, a former Student Governor, I strongly believe UBC can do much better to accommodate student needs. For instance, UBC’s disability accommodations policy, LR7, doesn’t encompass temporary disabilities, meaning students who experience temporary conditions such as illness, broken limbs, or concussions can’t access accommodations for their circumstances by the Centre for Accessibility (CfA). UBC’s disability policy also requires a formal diagnosis to be registered with the CfA, which can pose a significant barrier. Students may have to wait weeks to see a GP, only to then get referred to a specialist for their condition and learn that their diagnosis requires an assessment that isn’t covered by public insurance. This is supported by the fact that, according to UBC’s latest diversity census report, 25% of students with disabilities face barriers to diagnosis.
While addressing these systemic issues will take time, education can become more accessible immediately by embracing UDL principles and programs like the UDL Fellows Program. Working alongside so many faculty and staff dedicated to this work has been an immense privilege. As a Work Learn student, being able to communicate with and learn from leading experts in various fields has been invaluable to my own professional development. One theme that occurred over and over again in my interviews is that while there are many resources and tools out there that educators can use to increase accessibility in the classroom, many simply aren’t aware of the accessibility issues with their current practices, let alone aware of tools that can be used to improve said practices. In my role as a Communications Assistant, I had the opportunity to act as a megaphone for the incredible faculty and staff that have already done a lot of the work of implementing these tools, which I hope inspires others across the university to ponder how their own classrooms can be optimized through UDL implementation. In my last week as a Communications Assistant, I had the opportunity to present the student perspective of UDL to a room full of next year’s UDL Fellows, which was an incredibly valuable opportunity for me.
A call to action
If there is one message I hope educators take away, it is this: always question whether your pedagogy is truly accessible to all learners. Ask yourself—could a visually impaired student thrive in my course? A student with auditory impairments? A student with a mobility issue? A student with ADHD or learning disabilities?
By engaging critically with our teaching practices, we can move beyond retrofitting learning environments after the fact. Instead, we can proactively design education that welcomes and empowers every student from the start.
True accessibility is not an act of charity. It is an act of justice.