Disability and universal design for learning: experiences and perspectives for accessible higher education in Germany

Since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009, Germany has also recognized its responsibility to improve the integration of people with disabilities in educational processes. This includes not only schools, but also universities (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, 2015). As a result, promising methods that focus on handling the various backgrounds of students have been tested at various German universities. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a method that has been particularly successful. It takes differences between students with and without disabilities into account as early as in the planning stage of university teaching. The point of this method is not to react spontaneously to a problematic situation in learning, but to recognize barriers of learning in advance and to prepare solutions by improving curricular design. The success of this method in everyday university life was examined in the context of different studies (Karber et al., 2020 Bartz et al., 2018). The following questions are relevant: Do students perceive a difference in teaching using UDL? How do students with disabilities feel about the use of UDL? What are the experiences of teachers regarding UDL? What are the consequences for higher education didactics in the future? This chapter provides insight into previous experiences of accessible higher education didactics in Germany and provides impulses for its design in the future.