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Larger numbers of students are entering higher education with more diverse learning needs. While laws are in place to create equal access to education for all, government-mandated learning supports for students with documented disabilities vary significantly from K-12 education to higher education. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a course design framework based on Universal Design in architecture, neuroscience research, and the latest technology, to design learning environments and curriculums that are accessible to all students in every learning environment. This chapter reviews literature on the history of Universal Design concepts, starting with Universal Design in architecture and moving into UDL. A review of the learning preferences of Millennial students, along with the neuroscience of learning and its connection to the principles of UDL, is also included in the literature review. This chapter also includes a section on Dr. Buckland Parker's study which documents four faculty members who chose to work with a small team of faculty development specialists to redesign their large enrollment courses using the principles of Universal Design for Learning.

The purpose of this paper is to address how virtual learning environments (VLEs) can be designed to include the needs of learners with multiple disabilities. Specifically, it employs AI to show how specific learning materials from a huge repository of learning materials can be recommended to learners with various disabilities. This is made possible through employing semantic web technology to model the learner and their needs.

The paper reviews personalised learning for students with disabilities, revealing the shortcomings of existing e-learning environments with respect to students with multiple disabilities. It then proceeds to show how the needs of a student with multiple disabilities can be analysed and then simple logical operators and knowledge-based rules used to personalise learning materials in order to meet the needs of such students.

It has been acknowledged in literature that designing for cases of multiple disabilities is difficult. This paper shows that existing learning environments do not consider the needs of students with multiple disabilities. As they are not flexibly designed and hence not adaptable, they cannot meet the needs of such students. Nevertheless, it is possible to anticipate that students with multiple disabilities would use learning environments, and then design learning environments to meet their needs.

This paper, by presenting various combination rules to present specific learning materials to students with multiple disabilities, lays the foundation for the design and development of learning environments that are inclusive of all learners, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. This could potentially stimulate designers of such systems to produce such inclusive environments. Hopefully, future learning environments will be adaptive enough to meet the needs of learners with multiple disabilities.

This paper, by proposing a solution towards developing inclusive learning environments, is a step towards inclusion of students with multiple disabilities in VLEs. When these students are able to access these environments with little or no barrier, they will be included in the learning community and also make valuable contributions.

So far, no study has proposed a solution to the difficulties faced by students with multiple disabilities in existing learning environments. This study is the first to raise this issue and propose a solution to designing for multiple disabilities. This will hopefully encourage other researchers to delve into researching the educational needs of students with multiple disabilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered changes in previously unimaginable timeframes, leading to new ways of working, which can quickly become the “ordinary” way of working. Many traditional workplace and educational practices and environments, however, are disadvantageous to people with disability and consequently are under-represented in the workforce and higher education.

Contributing factors include exclusionary societal and employer attitudes and inaccessible built environments including lack of attention to paths of travel, amenities, acoustics, lighting and temperature. Social exclusion resulting from lack of access to meaningful work is also problematic. COVID-19 has accelerated the incidence of working and studying from home, but the home environment of many people with disability may not be suitable in terms of space, privacy, technology access and connection to the wider community.

However, remote and flexible working arrangements may hold opportunities for enhancing work participation of people with disabilities. Instigating systemic conditions that will empower people with disability to take full advantage of ordinary working trajectories is key. As the current global experiment in modified work and study practices has shown, structural, organisational and design norms need to change. The future of work and study is almost certainly more work and study from home. An expanded understanding of people with disabilities lived experience of the built environment encompassing opportunities for work, study and socialisation from home and the neighbourhood would more closely align with the UNCRPD's emphasis on full citizenship.

This paper examines what is currently missing in the development of a distributed work and study place continuum that includes traditional workplaces and campuses, local neighbourhood hubs and homes.

The proliferation of information in electronic format does not guarantee its accessibility. The fact that many Web sites are not accessible to large segments of the disabled community has created a “digital divide”. The accessibility barriers are systemic. In recent years, there has been a growing body of significant laws and standards concerning Web accessibility that impact people with disabilities. Ways of breaking down these barriers to a fuller accessibility implementation do exist, including education to raise awareness of Web accessibility, nationwide policy and guidelines for accessibility, and Web‐based applications and tools to facilitate Web accessibility, to name a few.

This study aims to investigate and propose guidelines to enhance the accessibility of virtual reality (VR) interfaces for all users within professional learning environments. Motivated by a lack of comprehensive accessibility guidelines for VR learning, the study delves into a case study of Edstutia’s VR campus.

This case study examines the intersection of VR platform development and learning experience design through the lens of accessibility in human-computer interaction. It elaborates on how user experience feedback from differently-abled learners who were unable to fully participate in the VR experience due to disability shaped the 2.0 version development of a VR platform.

The outcomes of this case study are (1) a description of an inclusive and empathetic design application to increase multi-learner VR platform accessibility, (2) a sample actionable path from a design/development perspective in ensuring the accessibility design of a VR learning platform, and recommendations to facilitate the design process.

This case is a foundation for further research on improving accessibility in VR. In future work on VR campuses, we recommend scholars undertake research with an inclusive approach that actively involves users with different abilities in shaping guidelines, particularly on how individuals with different abilities should be approached for their input during the design and development process in a sensitive manner.

The authors summarize the steps taken to enhance the accessible interplay between the end users and the interface of VR technology in the emergence of VR accessibility standards. Central to this case’s exploration is the integration of accessibility as a pivotal element into an academic VR campus, i.e. multilearner education platform.

Increasing access to VR has strong social implications in a world where 17% of people report a disability.

This case contributes to the limited research available on increasing access to VR on campuses.

This chapter discusses a bottom-up design strategy to support the principles of Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning adapted for online course development. The concept of Universal Design demands a holistic, bottom-up instructional design model for online course development that integrates technology, accessibility, recent instructional and learning theories, and a participatory postmodern worldview. This study is intended for faculty, instructional designers, administrators, assistive technology staff, and Web multimedia software vendors associated with higher education. The research assists these target audiences to design and develop online courses that are accessible without special adaptation or modification. The components of Universal Design for online learning support newer emergent approaches to instructional design, various programming solutions used in the software engineering field for efficiency, Universal Design for Learning, and legal guidelines associated with accessibility.

Accessible tourism is evolving as a field of academic research and industry practice, set within a dynamic social context. The field is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary. The purpose of this paper is to examine key concepts and global initiatives that will shape accessible tourism futures.

Three of the authors have extensive academic experience in the area and the fourth author is the Managing Director of the pre-eminent European Network for Accessible Tourism. In taking a limited Delphi approach to canvassing key areas likely to shape accessible tourism futures, the following concepts and policy initiatives were examined: motivations, dreams and aspirations of people with disability; demography; UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; destination competitiveness; universal design (UD); and the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

A discussion of each of the above areas was placed in context to accessible tourism futures and to contextualise the papers that were selected for the special issue. The latter part of the paper outlines the contribution of each empirical paper to the issue discussing the approach, findings and implications. Stakeholder collaboration was identified as the key common theme of the papers and the factor for developing accessible tourism solutions, recognising the value of the market and capitalising on it. A collaborative approach is required to recognise the complementary nature of the different paradigms; to re-shape and transform the future of the accessible tourism industry. To assist in the development of accessible tourism futures, UD principles should provide a foundation to enhance the future competitiveness of tourism destinations and organisations.

The paper’s examination of the concepts and global policy considerations provides a strong academic and practitioner foundation for considering accessible tourism futures. In doing so, accessible tourism futures are shown to be affected by key concepts related to core tourism considerations and major policy initiatives on accessibility and sustainability. Yet, accessible tourism futures also have the potential to create their own momentum and contribute unique learnings on the diversity of tourism markets that will shape tourism concepts and global policy initiatives in their own right.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the principles of universal design can be implemented by faculty and course designers to help give all learners access to equivalent information. It describes how information communication technologies can create barriers to information access, particularly when course content is rich in multimedia, but also how such technologies can be utilized to creates bridges to accessible content through designing for accessibility from the outset.

This paper offers a brief review of current international guidelines and US legislation related to information communication technologies in higher education. It documents the challenge of meeting these best practices and legal mandates, as evidenced by recent legal cases in the USA resulting from inaccessible course content in higher education. Finally, it describes how universal design can enhance accessibility for individuals with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive impairments and provides concrete suggestions for making content more accessible to all learners, not just those with disabilities.

Given the challenges of creating accessible content that provides equivalent information to all learners, faculty and course designers can implement the principles of Universal Design to enhance the learning environment for all students and ensure they are in compliance with guidelines and regulations. Such compliance is facilitated by emerging standards for accessible content and emerging technologies for making content accessible to all without the need for special accommodations.

This paper focusses on concrete approaches to achieving accessibility in higher education, a matter of increasing concern for moral reasons (it is the right thing to do) and for legal reasons given recent lawsuits.

Organizations are increasingly investing in disability-specific sensitization workshops. Yet, there is limited understanding about their hoped outcomes, that is, increased knowledge about disability-related issues and behavioral changes with respect to those with a disability. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness and boundaries of disability-specific sensitization training in organizations.

This is an interview-based study where 33 employees from five industries across India were interviewed over the span of a year.

The findings suggest that sensitization workshops are successful with regard to awareness generation. Paradoxically, the same awareness also reinforced group boundaries through “othering.” Further, workshops resonated more so with individuals who already had some prior experience with disability, implying that voluntary sensitization is likely attracting those who have the least need of such sensitization. The findings also suggest that non-mandated interventions may not necessarily influence organizational level outcomes, especially if workshops are conducted in isolation from a broader organizational culture of inclusion.

The present study helps outline effects of sensitization training initiatives and enhances our understanding about how negative attitudes toward persons with a disability can be overcome. The study also indicates how such training initiatives may inadvertently lead to “othering.” Finally, this study offers suggestions to human resource managers for designing impactful disability sensitization workshops.

In this chapter, we explore perceptions of exclusion and inclusion among students registered with the office of disability services at a large urban university in the United States. Our goal is to extend the current discourse on inclusion in higher education settings by drawing attention to social and cultural participation as an underemphasized aspect of educational inclusion and by bringing the perspectives of university students themselves into the discourse. While the general consensus among our interviewees seemed to be that schools and universities do a reasonably good job of developing classroom accommodations to meet their individual academic needs, stigma and social exclusion persist in damaging ways, in and outside of the classroom. A number of participants found solace and empowerment in interactions with other students with disabilities and suggested that until the forces of exclusion and stigmatization can be entirely eradicated, disability-friendly social and cultural activities and spaces designed by and for students with disabilities might provide an oasis of relief in a disabling world. Thus, we conclude that in addition to working towards the ultimate goal of making all aspects of university life disability-friendly, universities might better serve needs of current students by providing social spaces in which students with disabilities can socialize with each other and through which they might co-create and promote their own agendas for future institutional change.