With just over 34,000 students, adequate accessibility measures are critical to upholding Colorado State University’s standard of equal opportunity and inclusivity. However, students with disabilities face unique challenges on a campus with 692 buildings, many of which were built long before the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated accessible infrastructure in 1991.

While CSU has made updates to many of these buildings to better accommodate students and align with ADA guidelines, the university still falls short of achieving full accessibility, students and faculty said. Some issues include narrow entrances, small elevators, absence of handicap-accessible buttons on bathrooms, outdated door hardware and inaccessible classroom furniture, among other things.

“Being disabled and in an able-bodied world freaking sucks,” said Jess Gray, senator for the Student Disability Center. “There’s a lot of little places where disabled people fall between the cracks.”

Anicee Lamoreaux, disability spokesperson and founder of CSU’s Disability Club, said campus inaccessibility can interfere with her ability to get to class.

“For me, my main struggle is door buttons, elevators and snowy roads or snowy sidewalks,” Lamoreaux said. “I do have to let my professors know that I sometimes won’t be able to make it on campus.”

Although the ADA regulates existing buildings to some extent, Title III of the guidelines states that public entities are not required to make each existing facility accessible if applicable changes are not “able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense.”

Rye Vigil, chair of the Inclusive Physical and Virtual Campus Committee and assistant vice president of inclusive excellence, said the ADA only requires that CSU be as ADA-compliant as possible given so many university facilities predate the guidelines.

“We have to have a plan to get to compliance,” Vigil said. “That doesn’t mean just because there’s the ADA everything has to be in compliance. What that means is we need to be working toward 100% compliance.”

Vigil said ensuring ADA compliance is just one step toward achieving CSU’s ultimate goal of inclusivity, which seeks to accommodate every student regardless of their physical needs and can be achieved through universal design principles.

“(The ADA) doesn’t go above and beyond — it’s just, like, the bare minimum of what somebody would need,” Vigil said. “We’re now looking at how do we really as a university start to think about designing our spaces with the most flexibility and thoughtfulness for different needs.”

The IPVCC is just one of several CSU organizations working toward inclusivity on campus. The Disability Club, Student Disability Center and the Accessibility Caucus of the Associated Students of CSU are all involved in university improvement.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily (that) we don’t want to accommodate students,” Gray said. “I think that there’s generally just financial, structural and other components that kind of make the projects more tricky.”

Another factor interfering with campus accessibility is the extensive upkeep that some accommodations require. Morgan Snyder, chair of the Associated Students of CSU Accessibility Caucus, said the caucus intends to focus on maintaining and repairing accessibility features like buttons and railings this semester.

“The main problem seems to be that a lot of the existing stuff is kind of starting to wear, so we’re going to be taking a big look at that,” Snyder said.

Long term, the caucus hopes to integrate gender inclusivity with future accessibility measures, as well as pass a bill requiring university-facilitated events to accommodate people with hearing and sensory issues.

While physical accessibility and infrastructure remain crucial issues, the role of professors and faculty in fostering inclusive education is an aspect that often gets overlooked. Lamoreaux pointed out that some professors seem uneducated on the matter and do not adequately accommodate students with disabilities.

“Not a lot of professors know, like, the more current information on service dogs or disabilities,” Lamoreaux said. “Professors will need some kind of training at least, you know, once or twice a year because ADA is always changing.”

Some other examples of inclusive classroom education measures include recording lectures, providing sign language interpreters, ensuring video materials are captioned and replacing outdated classroom furniture with wheelchair-accessible desks.

One reason accessibility measures are not implemented to the extent many students expect is because students are unaware that they can request for changes to be made.

“There’s not, like, a sign in every building, like, ‘Oh, contact this person,’” Lamoreaux said. “When I first started college here, I really had no idea how to kind of support myself in that way and how to, like, reach out to people and who to contact, and so that was really, really difficult for me.”

Students who would like to report immediate campus accessibility issues can reach out to Facilities Management or visit the Student Disability Center. Students focused on long term issues can attend the weekly ASCSU Accessibility Caucus meetings, fill out the feedback form on the IPVCC website or join the Disability Club.

“Accessibility issues are community issues, and accommodations give us our lives back,” Gray said.

The university gave the following statement regarding accessibility at CSU.

“CSU is committed to meeting or exceeding legal accessibility requirements in remodeled or newly built spaces and, in older buildings, has applied the accessible design standards in place at the time of original construction,” the statement reads. “Each year, CSU also invests funding and resources in older buildings on campus to make improvements that often exceed current ADA standards. The accessible design standard that applies to each building will vary depending on when it was constructed or undergoes significant renovation.”

Reach Chloe Waskey at news@collegian.com or on social media @CSUCollegian.