UOA Execs Making Campus Inaccessible

It was sometime in March of this year, as a freshly appointed news editor searching keenly for article ideas that I stumbled upon the graffiti pictured above on a plant pot on campus. 

I sent a photo of it to the Craccum group chat, asking if anybody knew anything. They didn’t. The photo was then posted to Craccum’s Instagram story, asking if anybody could give us information, but no responses arose from it. After weeks of no updates, I’d moved onto covering other issues when one morning I received an email. A student had information about the graffiti. 

Through email correspondence, the student (who will remain anonymous for this article) described that the university has “a long history of excluding and isolating disabled students” through aspects such as architecture, lectures, and outdated attitudes, and that through these, it sends the message to disabled students that they are not welcome. The plant pots in particular were written on as they are placed smack bang in the middle of the sidewalk, which is usually already crowded with students anyway. These create major obstacles for wheelchair users, blind and low vision people, and those with guide dogs, and their placement shows the university’s lack of care and consideration towards accessibility. 

Along with this information the student also detailed many different issues with multiple buildings on the city campus, and a few weeks later, very kindly showed Lewis and I around these buildings so that we could see the issues for ourselves. 

The first thing that struck me was that there was little to no signage around the campus to help students find ramps or elevators, and some of these are extremely hidden. An elevator leading up to rooms such as Women’s Space and the Craccum office was through a narrow passage by AUSA house, and had no signage available telling people that it was there. The ramp at AUSA house itself was blocked by random boxes and seemed to be used as storage on the day that we went to see it. 

Following this, we went to the general library, where there is an elevator by the stairs for accessibility. However, the student guiding us noted that the elevator regularly breaks down, and that the university’s efforts to fix it are extremely slow to say the least. They recalled that in just the first three weeks of semester one, the elevator broke down three times, and that last year in the mid-term break of semester two, it was broken down for three whole weeks. Without this elevator, there is almost no way for students with accessibility needs to enter the library.

The only other way in, which the student then showed us, was a door on the side of the library, which was only accessible via using a keycard, which they had had to ask for themselves, and questioned whether other wheelchair users knew they had the option of asking for one, and were therefore unable to access the library when the elevator was broken. Ayolabi Martins, AUSA’s Disabilities Rights Officer agreed that this created an “inequitable barrier”. 

In addition to buildings such as Kate Edgar not having disabled bathrooms on every floor, buildings such as Humanities 206, the new 201 Arts building, and buildings on the Grafton campus have been observed to only have some automated doors, or automatic door opener buttons. These seemed to be placed at random with no particular logic on doors throughout the building, and our student guide pointed out to us how dangerous this particular aspect was. They described that should there be a situation where people had to evacuate the building, if they were in a classroom with no automatic door opener, they would have to rely on others to help them, and could become trapped inside of the room, which is a horrifying thought. 

It’s absolutely insane that a building such as 201, which is brand new and cost around $200 million dollars to design and construct, does not have automatic door openers for every room door and bathroom. Ayolabi explained to us that these automatic doors are called actuators, and that they are shockingly not considered mandatory in health and safety measures of buildings. He also mentioned that installing them costs up to $20,000, which is most certainly not cheap, but for a university that paid $320 million dollars for a new gym, it should be no problem installing measures to ensure safety and accessibility for their students. 

On top of issues with lack of actuators, lecture rooms themselves are also created with no consideration for disabled students. The height of the majority of desks in lecture rooms are not comfortable for use by wheelchair users, and the lecture rooms we saw had only one or two desks specially designed for wheelchair users. In one room, the desk wasn’t actually even in a certain position, meaning that the student wanting to use it would have to somehow move it into position. These lower desks were also always set up at the very front of the lecture theatre, which makes it quite difficult to see powerpoints, and a student would have to crane their neck all the way back, just to see. The height of desks being inaccessible was also an issue that I noted about the general library, in which I don’t ever recall seeing lower desks. 

As well as being designed in spacially inaccessible ways, many lighting aspects of different buildings were also pointed out to us, such as the extremely bright lights in the 201 building, which as Ayolabi explained, poses issues for students with sensory sensitivities, and often requires them to wear sunglasses while inside, and he explained that he was unsure whether the lights in 201 were able to be dimmed. It has even caused seizures in some students with photosensitive epilepsy. Additionally, in and outside of many buildings, the coloring on ramps did not contrast enough with the rest of the ground, which could create issues for students with low vision, as they wouldn’t be able to differentiate between the different areas.

The aspects mentioned and delved into further in this article are not the end of the list. Along with architectural aspects, students have also reported that the universities refusal to be flexible with deadlines for course enrollments or assessments are detrimental to their education, and creates an equal environment. 

It was in a student council meeting on the 20th of May when I believe I heard plans to remove the plant pots from the middle of the sidewalks on campus. It’s now September, and well, would you look at that? They’re still there. 

As the student who kindly emailed us said, “it’s pretty fucking dehumanizing.”