Lilypad

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by two guest speakers from the CU Disability Services office who came to talk with our class about the accommodation process here at Boulder and what challenges are experienced by students with disabilities.

What it does

Our application, Lilypad:

Helps students and families organize and share their disability documentation while in high school to improve their transition into receiving support in college, reducing delays in receiving accommodations.

Helps students review available resources and accommodation services provided at universities across the country to help them make decisions about where to attend college based on feedback from current students.

Helps students more effectively manage their accessibility services throughout their college career, making it easier to stay registered, meet requirements, and develop a history of support that can be provided to future employers if needed. The app connects with current institutions to facilitate the transfer of documentation and approvals.

How we built it

We reviewed peer-reviewed literature on student accessibility accommodations, identified key challenges, identified key product features, prototyped the designs on a whiteboard, and created final designs in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was the time allotted for this competition. There are many challenges for students in accessing accommodations throughout their educational career. We would have loved to include more features to address all of these challenges in our prototype, but time limited our scope. We still feel happy with what we were able to achieve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our idea and the potential benefit that it could provide students. We feel proud of our research and feel that there is a true need for this platform based on all of the challenges that students experience in requesting and maintaining accessibility accommodations in school.   We are also proud of the features we came up with, such as writing custom notes to professors which we feel would streamline access, improve education, and make it easier to students to work with their professors effectively to implement their accommodations.

What we learned

We learned that collaboration is extremely helpful in identifying needs and discovering solutions. All three of us have unique perspectives and insight that helped us to explore lots of different paths with this project. We did not know how many barriers there were for students to gain consistent disability support throughout college, so we learned a lot about gaps and opportunities in this space.

What's next for Lilypad

We would love to continue to refine our designs and implement features that we did not have time to include. We want to build out the specific process for allowing universities to connect with Lilypad in order to facilitate transfer of information and documentation. We would also like to build out the "find an ally" or "find a friend" feature that allows students to match with reputable accommodation allies trained through the university to help manage a student's disability throughout college.

We would also be interested in exploring supporting advanced accessibility customizations, such as font style, font size, and background colors.