Preliminary research report:
Evaluation of digital practices related to services offered to students with disabilities in post-secondary institutions in Quebec
This article presents the progress of a research project, started in 2023, which evaluates the practices connected to services offered to students with disabilities in post-secondary establishments in Québec. Led by Maude Chartier-Desjardins in collaboration with AQEIPS and supervised by Felicity Spence, this project benefits from the financial support of the program Service aux collectivités of UQAM.
This project comprises of two main parts: an evaluation of digital practices on websites of Quebec postsecondary establishments concerning accommodation and support services for students with disabilities (part 1) and an evaluation of services actually offered in these same postsecondary institutions (part 2). The goal of AQEIPS is to create a list of recommendations to improve and standardize accessibility and inclusivity practices in Québec academic institutions.
The preliminary results of the project (part 1) reveal significant gaps in digital accessibility and access to online information, an essential element for students with disabilities. The goal of this preliminary report is to identify specific issues and propose solutions to standardize digital practices across all academic establishments.
To read the complete preliminary research report: (currently only available in French)
Based on the guide Communicating for all: guide for accessible information (Ruel and Allaire, 2018) and drawing inspiration from the rubric developed as part of the action research project Info accessible-Numérique : Accéder à l’information et à sa compréhension pour une société inclusive (Ruel et al., 2020), the evaluation process made it possible to define 13 specific criteria meeting the needs of students with disabilities attending post-secondary institutions, grouped into three categories:
- Digital accessibility; aimed at evaluating the design of websites in terms of access to information and how it is presented, such as the ease of navigation, the writing on the web page or the accessible format of campus maps.
- The specificities of disabilities; aimed at facilitating accessibility to digital information for people with hearing and visual impairments, through a plurality of methods for presenting this information (such as subtitles for videos and ASL interpretation).
- Access to information on services offered; aimed at ensuring that relevant information in terms of services available is present on designated web pages (such as examples of accommodations offered or even internal policies of educational establishments).
As a part of the initial research, this research looked at 88 websites of postsecondary establishements in Québec, including all universities as well as a sampling of nearly 60% of cegeps and other professional training institutions.