Creating Equal Opportunities: Evaluating Physical Facilities for Undergraduate Students with Special Needs

Abstract

Every individual in the world desires to carry out their daily tasks with ease. The surrounding environment plays a crucial role in facilitating this. While able-bodied individuals seamlessly navigate their surroundings, people with special needs often face significant challenges in meeting their requirements. Therefore, it is essential for them to have a moral understanding of the support they receive from their environment. The main objective of this research is to investigate the available physical facilities that were provided to the visually impaired and physically disabled undergraduates by their universities. The purposive sample contained 100 differently abled undergraduates from five universities namely; Sri Jayewardenepura, Colombo, Kelaniya, Jaffna, and Eastern university. A structured interview schedule was used for data collection. According to the results, students had a certain level of awareness regarding library facilities (46%), elevator facilities (53%), cafeteria facilities (75%) and sanitary facilities (67%). They have a moderate level of satisfaction on access to the library (30%), lecture halls (22%), gymnasium (41%) and hostels (29%) at their respective universities. Results revealed that there are some issues that visually impaired students face during their education that need to be addressed. Implementing equal opportunities is essential to create a user- friendly environment at universities and hostels to provide the students a satisfactory experience during their university education in spite of the disability.