UCLA Disability Studies is proud to share research by UCLA PhD student and Disability Studies Graduate Student Instructor Alexa Vaughn. Vaughn’s research continues to advance accessibility auditing and methodology to bring the disabled community into the design process.
Abstract
The accessibility audit is a largely underutilized tool of disabled community engagement in the design process. This essay shares four case studies of accessibility audits facilitated between 2021 and 2024 for four separate groups of landscape architects, designers, and students. Its methodology is centered in disability justice and crip theory. In the attempt to illustrate how to conduct an accessibility audit by including direct participation of disabled stakeholders and disabled designers and experts, the goal is to assist the landscape architecture and urban design professions in deviating from the usage of sensitivity studies (or disability simulations), which are inappropriate, misguided, and outdated attempts at measuring site accessibility. In this way, designers and students might learn to prioritize disabled lived experience in the design process.
About Alexa Vaughn
Alexa Vaughn (ASLA, FAAR) is a Deaf landscape-urban designer, accessibility specialist, and PhD student in Architecture + Urban Design at UCLA. She seeks to bridge the gap between practice and scholarship and to address ableism, exclusion, and inaccessibility in the built environment through a lens of critical disability studies. She is an expert in design for the Deaf community (DeafSpace/DeafScape) and in facilitating engagement of the disabled community in the design process: she works to center lived experience as expertise and to design beyond minimal compliance. Alexa holds both a BA and MLA in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been published and featured widely, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture (2022-23). Much of her practice-based research can be found on her website at www.DesignWithDisabledPeopleNow.com.
