The Staff’s Column
An SDU accessible to everyone
Don’t worry, this column does not advocate free admission to the University, but rather an SDU that is accessible to everyone – including people with physical and more hidden disabilities.
SDU’s Campus Odense is not an easy place to find your way around, even after 17 years of employment. Of course, there is a map app and some relatively new maps posted at the entrances (with no room numbers on the maps!!). Before you reach these maps, however, you typically have to climb about ten high concrete steps. I am able do this, unlike many of the guests I receive for teaching and research projects. This is because they have acquired brain damage including physical consequences of this in many cases and certainly also including communication difficulties (such as difficulties finding words, understanding what others are saying, reading and writing). Every day, SDU is also navigated by students and colleagues with physical disabilities – and well, for good reasons, I don’t see any of the hidden difficulties, such as communication difficulties.
The door is in the way
In May, I had a visit from a couple of gentlemen with language difficulties, one of whom also has physical challenges in the form of hemiplegia. They didn’t have any trouble getting here and finding me, but that is because they have visited SDU around ten times and know how to find the accessible parking spaces that are located reasonably near my office. However, my guest with physical challenges had his work cut out for him when he had to descend the stairs from Gydehutten down to Bøgene, holding a plate of food in his healthy hand and having to reach a railing with his partially paralysed hand while the door (obviously an important but always open fire door) filled the entire landing, so that he had to balance the plate and take the first steps without being able to reach the railing. Why didn’t I help him? This has to do with pride and a desire for independence on the part of my guest.
Long directions
And then there is communicative accessibility, which is a core challenge for my guests. First of all, we can only hope that the room that has been booked is close to accessible parking spaces. Next, I have to take pictures of doors, corridors, stairs and tram stops, and check door numbers, elevators, nearby toilets, etc. Then we’ll be ready to create so-called aphasia-friendly directions, which often ends up being a five-page explanation in simple language, supplemented by the pictures and a telephone number for a phone that is zealously checked around the start of the meeting.
The technology is also challenging
In addition, there is technological accessibility. Don’t get me started. Travel expenses and fee forms – I’m grateful for the ever-helpful secretaries at my department who save my guests from having to register in zExpense themselves and do their own travel reimbursements. We’re also having a lot of fun with SDU’s recent security measure on Zoom where an obligatory password or waiting room has been introduced without warning. What’s the problem with that? You see, students at the Speech and Language Therapy programme volunteer to meet online every week with people with aphasia in the social programme Afasifællesskabet (the Aphasia Community). For these events, order and consistency are important: the same link every week, no password and the option to log in without ending up in a waiting room because the meetings may take place without any students, for example during the exam season.
Let us find flexible solutions
Can’t we do better than this? Selecting and deselecting passwords on zoom. Clear markings of accessible ‘pathways’ on campus, clear signage for toilets, for the tram and for parking, a ‘bank’ with images of entrance doors, tram stops and templates for creating customised maps and directions. SDU might even invite staff, students and guests with accessibility challenges to join forces in an effort to make SDU accessible to everyone?
Jytte Isaksen
Associate professor at the Department of Culture and Language. She conducts research on and with people with aphasia, that is, communication difficulties after stroke and other acquired brain injuries. In addition, she has promised her collaboration partners and guests with aphasia to write this column because they have experienced how difficult it is to be a guest at SDU.