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Navigating Graduate School with a Disability

Published: 29 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

In graduate school, people with disabilities use disability accommodations to learn, network, and do research. However, these accommodations, often scheduled ahead of time, may not work in many situations due to uncertainty and spontaneity of the graduate experience. Through a three-person autoethnography, we present a longitudinal account of our graduate school experiences as people with disabilities, highlighting nuances and tensions of situations when our requested accommodations did not work and the use of alternative coping strategies. We use retrospective journals and field notes to reveal the impact of our self-image, relationships, technologies, and infrastructure on our disabled experience. Using post-hoc reflection on our experiences, we then close with discussing personal and situated ways in which peers, faculty members, universities, and technology designers could improve the graduate school experiences of people with disabilities.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        ASSETS '20: Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
        October 2020
        764 pages
        ISBN:9781450371032
        DOI:10.1145/3373625
        This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 29 October 2020

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        Author Tags

        1. Autoethnography
        2. STEM
        3. accessibility
        4. accessible technology
        5. blind
        6. computer science education
        7. engineering
        8. graduate school
        9. hard of hearing
        10. mobility impaired
        11. trio-ethnography

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        ASSETS '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 46 of 167 submissions, 28%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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        • (2024)Not a “Typical Expat”: An Autoethnographic Account on Accessible RelocationProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688546(1-6)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
        • (2024)Co-designing a 3D-Printed Tactile Campus Map With Blind and Low-Vision University StudentsProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688537(1-6)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
        • (2024)"I Am Human, Just Like You": What Intersectional, Neurodivergent Lived Experiences Bring to Accessibility ResearchProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675651(1-20)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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