Rethinking “Empowering Technology” in Higher Education Accessibility: A Case Study of Disabled Students’ Experiences at a German University

In higher education, disabled students continue to face challenges in achieving a fully equitable and rewarding academic and social studentship experience, despite existing accessibility laws and the potential of technology to enhance access. In this case study, we explore the experiences of 12 disabled students with various disabilities through in-depth interviews to answer our research questions: 1) How do disabled students (not) use (assistive) technologies to navigate higher education and how does this affect their studentship experience specifically around accessibility? and 2) What are the implications for organizational, community-level, and individual technologies for empowering disabled students in higher education? Through reflexive thematic analysis of the students’ accounts, we present our findings under two main themes: 1) Breaking Down the Higher-Education Accessibility: Disabled Students and the Surrounding Ecosystem , and 2) Navigating the System and Own Resources: The Long Journey Toward Accessibility . Later, we discuss our findings from the perspective of Empowerment Theory and show how empowerment in the higher education context may be understood at three different levels: organizational, community, and individual. Finally, we define “empowering technology” in the context of higher education accessibility and provide design considerations for empowering technology in higher education.