Constructing Accessible Technology Policy in a University Setting During COVID

The University College London’s Moving to Online Teaching and Homeworking (MOTH) project used this data to mobile and advocate for improved accessibility in remote meetings during the pandemic. We conducted a survey running from March to June 2020 with UCL’s staff. As part of the survey, staff who took part in teaching and research shared challenges and opportunities, as well as images that communicated their experience. The focus of our study was on how working from home impacted teaching and research, rather than asking staff members to report on their disability. Nonetheless, many staff members took the opportunity to write comments regarding disability implications in our open-ended qualitative questions. From the responses, it was clear that disabled people experience both challenges and opportunities from working at home. This paper reports that data and discusses the rapid responses to disseminate the data and make recommendations to ameliorate the situation. Rather than using a top-down approach led by literature, we worked with disabled activists as part of UCL’s Disability Equality Steering Group to act on the findings based on lived experience. We present our data and recommendations here modeling best practices for acting on research findings led by the disabled community in the spirit of “nothing about us without us”.