Accessibility (2)

I realised that no matter what the laws say or are in place, we have got to pursue the Awareness Training and find ways to highlight and campaign for the Rights of Disabled People, as people would be the prime mover in enforcing the laws.

The previous post was on USM's attitude on disabled access and the confident intake of disabled students. Of course, we would like to know more, such as how the disabled students will cope with the facilities at USM and whether they managed to complete their studies. I would like to know how many disabled students had USM taken in and how many percent graduated? If its 100% percent that would say a lot about USM, but even 80% would be a realistic picture as other factors should be considered apart from Accessibility.

I have heard of a story about a disabled student studying in the Faculty of Medicine at UM, and eventually she could not cope due to many barriers, and assumed that she had problems physically accessing classrooms and so on. Then UM, transferred her to the Faculty of Science, presumably taking another course and she failed again, and eventually decided to do something on IT at a private college, and managed to succeed. I wonder if her earlier failures were mostly based on frustration of poor facilities and services, as she had proven she can succeed eventually. But it would be good to find out what happened to her and other university's disabled students, including USM and UM.

University service providers would need to have both facilities and services to be accessible. This means that even though the place may have a few manageable physical barriers, the attitude of the staff and administrators would be crucial in helping out disabled students to succeed. That part would fall under services or/and management.