Your Campus Is "Accessible" But Is It Actually?
1 minute read
Published Jan 1, 2026
There's a lift. There's a ramp. There's a hearing loop sign on the lecture theatre door. Box ticked, right?
Not quite.
The lift exists, but it's tucked behind a fire door in a corridor you'd never find unless someone told you. The ramp is there, but it deposits you at a side entrance that's locked after 5pm. The hearing loop? No one's tested it in years.
Compliant but Not Accessible
This is the gap between technical compliance and actual usability. Buildings can meet legal requirements and still be genuinely difficult to navigate for disabled students, staff, and visitors.
Students across UK universities report the same friction points. Lecture recordings with inaudible audio. "Accessible" seating that means sitting alone at the front. Quiet study spaces that don't exist or aren't enforced. Lifts that break down for weeks. Staff who don't know how to turn on the accessibility features in their own rooms.
Ticked the Box, Missed the Point
The problem isn't bad intentions. Most universities genuinely want to be inclusive. The problem is that accessibility has been treated as a checklist exercise, something you achieve once and forget about, rather than an ongoing experience shaped by the people who actually use these spaces.
A building isn't accessible because an architect said so. It's accessible if the people using it can actually get where they need to go, do what they need to do, and feel like they belong there.
That's why real-time, crowdsourced accessibility information matters. Not what the facilities team thinks the experience is, what it actually is, today, from the people navigating it.
Because "technically accessible" and "actually accessible" are two very different things. And closing that gap starts with listening.
Keywords: campus accessibility problems, university accessibility audit, accessible buildings compliance gap, disability inclusion higher education, student accessibility experience UK, real accessibility vs compliance, crowdsourced accessibility ratings
