The STEM Disability Committee, backed by many of the UK’s learned societies, is developing a list of “essential competencies” for different science subjects with the aim of making them more easily accessible to people with disabilities.
The committee was launched in 2011 to find practical ways to “improve policies, practices and provision” for disabled people. Committee members work on a voluntary basis and the organisation receives small amounts of income from members including the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics and the Society of Biology.
John Conway, the committee’s chairman and a soil scientist at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester, where he is also a disability officer, told Research Fortnight that the main aim of the list was to make science careers more open to people with disabilities. “We think about how essential each competency is and how a certain disability might come up against it—but with a view to fixing it,” he says.
“For example, in physics it is difficult for someone with a physical impairment to take part in practical experiments, but once the data are collected they can be given them in a form that they can assimilate and then do the thinking and analysing. And in my field, soil science, it is possible to provide quad bikes or all-terrain wheelchairs for field trips.” Conway says the main challenge in maths is sight impairment, as speech-reading software cannot read out complex mathematical equations very well. But the technology is constantly improving, he adds.
One of the committee’s other projects, through the Scottish Sensory Centre, is to develop a sign language for science with 850 signs. Phrases previously communicated through finger spelling and lip-reading—such as light year and X-ray—now have their own signs.
The committee is especially concerned with disabled schoolchildren, says Conway. “The parents or the schools may not think it’s possible for a disabled student to do a science subject at university, which means that the students themselves don’t consider it,” he says. “One major aspect of our work is trying to get the message out that these careers are possible.”
However, he warns that the problem extends to academia, where a lot of academics and lecturers often don’t know how to respond to a student with a disability they have not encountered before. “We need to get the message to them that there are just specific things they can and cannot do, and the university disability officer can help.”