The Alliance for Disability Awareness at Iowa State hosted an open forum on inclusive design and campus accessibility Thursday night in Pearson Hall.

The open forum was headed by Dakota Olson, sophomore majoring in global resource systems, and Laura Wiederholt, junior in biology.  

The idea for the open forum came to Olson when he had trouble asking for closed captioning for movies at Cyclone Cinema. Olsen said that it took two months to get Cyclone Cinema to have closed captioning in their movies, which he said is as simple as changing a disk.

“The purpose of tonight was to try to get a better representation of students on campus who have different barriers, because the two of us don’t represent everyone,” Olson said. “This is definitely not the end of it.”

Resident life, academics, facilities and other areas of concern were addressed by several people at the forum. One of those issues was wheelchair accessibility.

“A lot of rooms aren’t very accessible to wheelchairs, and if they are you can only sit in the back of the rooms,” said Wiederholt, who was diagnosed with dysautonomia, a disorder where the nervous system does not function properly. “We often have to choose between sitting near the front or sitting where it is more easily accessible.”

Another issue for students with disabilities is access to academic material in their classes. Some issues discussed were audio and visual materials that are often not available online for students all the time. Disabilities also affect students that want to live in residential learning communities like Women in Science and Engineering but are limited to housing that is accessible to them.

“We need to build to the needs of people, not just build to meet the minimum requirements,” said Arvid Osterberg, university professor in architecture who works on the advocacy for inclusive design. “A group like this is really important to be an advocacy group to push forward this agenda, truly making the campus environment as inclusive as possible.”

Olson and Wiederholt said that it was difficult to get the ears of anyone to voice their concern, let alone the concerns of students who might be less involved.

“My biggest priority is having that mechanism in place,” Olson said. “That opens it up. Anybody has the ability to share with ISU administration a barrier that they face, and it can be addressed in a timely, meaningful way.”

“Another big goal of ours is to try to get [administration] to put plans in place to account for the growing student population,” Wiederholt said. “That was a big concern we went in with. The staff numbers at Student Disability Resources hasn’t increased for years — there are four — and the number of students they serve has.”  

The Alliance for Disability Awareness will be presenting a forum summary to the Division of Student Affairs, who it is working with to resolves issues relating to accessibility.