Building accessibility into service delivery at Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Accessibility in a post-secondary environment reaches beyond the classroom. Students need equitable access to events, career development, counselling services, and all the other crucial services that support their academic and personal success. Recently, the Untapped team finished a project with Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) on just that: expanding the accessibility of their Student Affairs service delivery practices.
We’ve been working together with KPU since 2023, starting right from our foundations of accessibility training and then narrowing in on accessible service delivery. KPU’s Student Affairs collaborated with the university’s Office of Equity and Inclusive Communities (OEIC) to secure funding for this initiative.
Two trainings and a co-design session
We facilitated three sessions with the KPU team.
Session 1: Foundations of accessibility and the Accessible BC Act training
This 90-minute training was offered to the entire department and provided foundational accessibility information. The team learned about BC’s accessibility legislation, inclusive language practices, and key models of disability. Starting here is important for gaining a consistent vocabulary and understanding of disability issues across teams. Speaking the same language when it comes to accessibility is key for unlocking collective responsibility.
Session 2: Intro to Untapped’s accessible service delivery framework training
This 2-hour training was our first step in building understanding for the KPU team about how their services might look from the perspective of students with disabilities. We created custom scenarios for them and taught them how to break down their service activities using our framework.
Session 3: Co-design workshop for a more accessible service flow
Finally, we brought the team together for a half-day session to co-design more accessible services. By activating the learning from previous trainings, teams were able to brainstorm more accessible service delivery options in real time.
Untapped’s Accessible Client Services Framework
Our accessible service delivery training is rooted in the understanding that to better meet the needs of our clients, we need to develop the skill of identifying barriers in our environments.
Historically, organizations have relied on people with disabilities to come forward, report the barriers they encounter, and then the organization may proceed in implementing an accommodation. But true accessibility is a collective responsibility and we need to train our brains to be looking for and anticipating the diverse needs of our communities.
Once KPU had completed that initial service delivery training, they were eager to put it into practice. They saw our framework as a tangible tool for not just understanding accessibility from a theoretical perspective, but also as a tool for making practical change to their policies and practices. Together, we then set out to host a co-design session between the Student Affairs division and Untapped. We settled on a 3-hour session that would only have a little bit of training from us, and mostly keep the time for breakout room discussions. The purpose was to give the KPU teams as much time together to apply what they had learned in previous trainings, to identify practical changes to the ways they offer services for students.
We approached the design of this session in three phases:
Phase one: Mapping existing service flows
For this session, we broke the division down into their smaller teams so that they could all unpack and re-design a service activity that was part of their daily workflow. To begin, we asked each manager to complete a short worksheet which called upon their learning from the previous trainings we did together. We asked them to consult their teams and identify the service activity they wanted to investigate during our co-design. Some teams looked at intake processes and others looked at events.
Once we received the completed service flow worksheets, the Untapped team moved the information into Miro and created the blank templates for their online whiteboard discussions. This process allowed the staff to show up on the training day with materials ready to get their brainstorm juices flowing!
Phase two: Training managers to facilitate team brainstorms
Since the training was broken up by small teams within the department, each manager led their breakout groups through the activities. To make sure they were prepared to facilitate, we created a step-by-step facilitator guide and hosted a facilitator prep session two weeks before the all-staff training. There, the managers were able to refresh their knowledge about the framework and ask any questions.
The benefit of having managers lead these breakout sessions is that they, along with their teams, have all the expertise about the service delivery. If the breakout groups had been facilitated by a member of the Untapped team, we may have had to spend more time unpacking how the services worked before we could get into making the service work better. Instead, with this model they were able to jump right in.
Phase three: Running a co-design session
Once we got to the co-design day, everything was tidy and ready to go! We at Untapped had taken the completed pre-session worksheets and used them to populate Miro boards– our online whiteboard platform. Miro allowed us to have pre-constructed activities that were interactive not only for the manager facilitators, but the whole team. Since the white boards had been populated with their pre-session reflections, they were able to jump right into future visioning. In their breakout groups, teams worked through three iterative activities which built on one another throughout the session. By the end of the session, teams had identified key barriers, strengths, and opportunities for improved accessibility in their services. They had planned for more flexibility in the ways that their services could be offered, and they were more prepared to describe the accessibility features of their services to students with disabilities.
The session was a great success. One unexpected benefit of having the managers guide the breakout sessions was that each one was able to operate in a way that matched their typical workflows. Some teams loved the ability for creative thinking and talking through the user experience. Other teams worked more independently and added their thoughts in writing to the board and then took time at the end to discuss the additions. It was amazing to see teams working in real time to identify, prevent, and remove barriers for students.
Student-centered impact
The most important outcome of this work is the increased capacity of staff to think and act accessibly. KPU’s student affairs professionals are now more equipped to identify and remove barriers before they become problems for students. This shift from reactive to proactive design has the potential to transform how students experience support.
This work also benefits the entire student population. Flexibility, clarity, and choice aren’t just accessibility features; they’re good design principles that will serve all students.
As institutions continue to navigate complex student needs and systemic inequities, KPU’s example shows what’s possible when accessibility is viewed not as a challenge, but as a commitment to equity and excellence.
Here’s what our client had to say
Partnering with the team at Untapped has been incredibly rewarding. Their depth of expertise, combined with a genuine commitment to understanding and addressing our specific organizational needs, made a real difference. At every step, the team at Untapped were thoughtful, responsive, and solutions-focused, while also challenging us to think more deeply about how we support our students and helping us to become more skilled at identifying and addressing the barriers they face. I truly believe our collaboration was not only impactful but also a highly valuable use of our time.
-Joshua Mitchell, AVP Student Affairs, KPU