What deaf and hard of hearing students say makes higher education accessible

Updated Apr 13, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we work with universities that need to see where headline scores conceal very different experiences for different student groups. A recent Higher Education paper by Holtzman and colleagues makes that gap hard to ignore: it shows how deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students describe accessibility and support in their institutions, and where everyday friction still undermines participation. For UK teams working on disabled student experience, the paper is valuable because it shows what accessibility looks like from the student perspective, and why the gap between policy and practice so often appears in routine communication, teaching, and support processes. Read the paper here.

The context will feel familiar to many universities. Institutions may have formal obligations, adjustments processes, and specialist support, yet students still encounter friction where teaching, administration, and informal learning meet. Holtzman et al. ask what DHH students perceive as the main barriers to participation, and which kinds of support and institutional practice help them succeed. Although the study is based in Israel, the operational lessons travel well to the UK sector because the same issues appear repeatedly in student feedback: access to information, predictable processes, and staff capability.

One of the clearest messages is that accessibility is experienced as a system, not as a set of isolated accommodations. Students described accessibility problems in lectures and wider academic life, including moments where adjustments were missing, inconsistent, or dependent on repeated follow-up. That matters because it shifts the improvement task away from one-off fixes and toward process reliability.

"The system utterly fails to provide accessibility in lectures, even in large courses."

The paper also highlights the hidden work of self-advocacy. DHH students often had to explain what they needed, remind staff, and adapt their own study strategies. That labour is easy for universities to overlook because it can disappear in standard reporting, yet it shapes how students experience belonging, fairness, and wellbeing. If you do not measure that burden, it is easy to mistake technical compliance for a genuinely accessible experience.

Another theme is variability: support quality can depend on who teaches a module, how well information flows between teams, and whether assistive technologies are available and reliable. When accessibility depends on ad hoc goodwill rather than predictable design, students can experience each semester as a fresh negotiation. The operational takeaway is simple: students should not have to relearn how accessible their university will be every term.

At the same time, Holtzman et al. show that DHH students are not only describing barriers. They also describe agency and strategies: using technologies, developing routines, and drawing on peer support to navigate complex learning environments. For UK institutions, that is a reminder to recognise student expertise and to treat accessibility improvements as co-designed student voice work, not just compliance tasks. The best fixes usually come from listening to how students already navigate the gaps.

Practical implications

For UK higher education teams, three practical moves follow from this study.

First, design for accessibility by default, then audit it. Captioning and transcripts for recordings, microphone use in teaching spaces, accessible slides and documents, and clear guidance on what students can expect are all basic signals that reduce the need for individual escalation. They also make accessibility more visible and dependable for everyone involved.

Second, reduce process friction. Where adjustments, timetabling changes, or support requests are handled through fragmented channels, students end up repeating themselves and chasing information. Using a single source of truth, named ownership, and clear resolution times helps turn good intent into a reliable experience that students can trust.

Third, use student voice data to prioritise and verify fixes. Survey scores can tell you whether disabled students are having a worse experience, but they rarely tell you where the breakpoints are. Open-text comments, module evaluation responses, and pulse surveys can surface concrete failure modes such as "captions missing", "interpreter not booked", or "staff did not know the process". Analysed well, that feedback becomes an operational roadmap you can act on, then track over time.

The broader lesson is that accessibility often fails in the handoffs between teams, systems, and habits. If universities want to improve DHH student experience, they need more than policy statements. They need clear evidence of where communication, delivery, and follow-through are breaking down in lived experience.

FAQ

Q: How can universities use student feedback to improve accessibility for DHH students?

A: Start by ensuring DHH students have accessible ways to give feedback, not just end-of-year surveys, then combine structured questions with open-text prompts about teaching delivery, communication, and support processes. Use the comments to identify repeatable issues you can fix institution-wide, such as recording quality, captions, or unclear points of contact, then close the loop by telling students what changed.

Q: What should we be cautious about when applying a qualitative case study to our own institution?

A: A small qualitative study does not provide prevalence rates, and local context matters. Treat the findings as a high-quality map of plausible barriers and mechanisms, then test them against your own evidence, such as student comments, support service data, and disability gap metrics. The goal is to translate insight into hypotheses you can validate and act on.

Q: What does this imply for NSS and internal survey analysis in the UK?

A: It reinforces the need to segment and interpret results carefully, because averages can hide accessibility breakdowns that affect specific groups. It also underlines why free-text matters: for accessibility, the actionable detail is often in the narrative. When you can systematically analyse open comments, you can pinpoint the specific touchpoints that are failing and track whether interventions are improving lived experience.

References

[Paper Source]: Daniel Holtzman, Rinat Michael, Sawsan Alwakil, Mohammad Karkabi, Ameer Hamra "Accessibility and support in higher education: a case study of deaf and hard of hearing students’ perceptions" DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01586-x

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