Since 2018, VU Amsterdam has been committed to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and making the university more inclusive. Last academic year, a project group started to focus on increasing the physical accessibility of the VU campus for students and staff.
To get a clear picture of the accessibility of our buildings, a specialist agency was asked to investigate the publicly accessible areas of VU buildings. Accessibility was measured based on the integral accessibility standard (ITS), which indicates the degree of accessibility.
Users' experiences are essential
In addition to objective measurements, the experiences and perceptions of users are essential to understanding perceived accessibility and support needs. An intern from the Global Health master's programme therefore conducted a survey among students and staff at VU Amsterdam. To find out where the main areas for improvement lie, students and employees with different functional limitations and chronic conditions were interviewed. These included visual, auditory and motor disabilities, but also neurodivergences such as autism, ADHD, brain injury and hypersensitivity to stimuli.
Improvement plan
From both surveys, a variety of improvement points emerged for the various target groups in terms of physical accessibility to the VU campus. In the coming period, the project group will focus on prioritizing and creating an improvement plan based on the various themes. Here it is important to take into account the design of existing buildings, in which not all adaptations will be possible.
Accessible map VU campus
The working group is now focusing on an accessible map of the VU campus. Furthermore, approaches and decision-making regarding the improvement plan are being prepared, in order to further improve the accessibility of our campus with every measure in the plan!
Members project group
The project group consists of scientists from the faculty of Science and the faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, a student, employees of FCO and the team Studying with a Disability (SMF).