"My Body Became the Access Infrastructure": An Autoethnographic Account of a deaf Student's Transition to Higher Education in Nigeria

In Nigeria, d/Deaf students face late school entry, absent early intervention, and limited sign language infrastructure, as Nigerian Sign Language (NSL) was introduced only in 1960 and remains rare in mainstream classrooms [4]. Institutional barriers to higher education are compounded by cultural and religious stigma. Across sub-Saharan Africa, hearing impairment is frequently attributed to spiritual causes or ancestral wrongdoing [4, 23], and Nigerian Pentecostal churches have reinforced this framing through healing crusades and deliverance services in which deafness is constructed as a spiritual malady to be eradicated rather than an identity warranting accommodation [29, 32]. For d/Deaf young people embedded in these faith communities, the message is categorical: deafness is undesirable, and persistence of the condition implies incomplete faith or ongoing sin [29]. These framings reflect a predominantly medical and spiritual model of deafness; one that treats hearing loss as a deficit to be cured rather than, as in the cultural-linguistic model of Deafhood, a source of shared language and identity. Which model prevails shapes whether sign language is nurtured or suppressed, and whether Deaf students are seen as needing accommodation or correction.

A substantial body of literature documents the barriers DHH and disabled students face in education: inaccessible lecture formats, the social labor of disclosure, and accommodation systems that assume proactive self-advocacy and bureaucratic fluency [25, 26, 40]. Jain et al. show that when formal systems are too rigid or absent, disabled graduate students improvise “uncharted accommodations”—informal, self-built strategies that fill institutional gaps [21]. This dynamic is intensified for DHH students whose communication needs are often poorly understood by hearing-centric institutions [30].

Within Accessible Computing, researchers have examined how DHH people's AT use is entangled with identity: customizing or hiding devices to navigate disclosure [34, 35], or rejecting AT that misaligns with Deaf cultural identity altogether [43]. Critically, most of this work is situated in high-resource, Western settings. Accessible computing research in low-resource, Global South and sub-Saharan African contexts is scarce (e.g., [28]), and where it exists, disabled people construct access informally—through community platforms, smartphones, and DIY tools—rather than through institutional provision [5, 18, 19, 37]. In this paper, we contribute to this nascent body of work through exploring Sunday Ubur's experience as a DHH student in Nigeria.

Life transition theory offers a structured account of how people move through major life changes. During a life transition, liminality [41, 42] captures the ambiguity of being betwixt and between social positions and suspension of prior identity. Being in between social structures produces an absence of social structure, what Turner calls anti-structure [31, 41]. Liminality also provides potential for new solidarities to emerge through shared in-betweenness, what Turner calls communitas [41]. Figueira et al.’s concept of Intersecting Liminality extends this idea by recognizing that multiple threshold conditions can coexist and compound [13, 15]. A student may be at once between educational systems, between disability identities, and communities (e.g., [14]). This simultaneity characterizes the experience we analyze here.

I was in Primary Five² when I became deaf at age 13. This sudden change interrupted my schooling. My parents kept me home for three years as they sought medical solutions. Afterwards, I was enrolled in a school for the deaf, but I was placed back by two grades into Primary Three. There, I learned sign language and continued my education in a new learning environment. Although the school provided an important foundation, my academic pathway was shaped by low expectations. After Junior Secondary School³, our teachers often told us that deaf students were expected to proceed to technical or trade schools to learn skills such as carpentry, plumbing, or building, rather than pursue advanced academic fields such as science, engineering, or medicine.

I resisted these assumptions and began advocating for myself. I independently sought admission into a private secondary school in northern Nigeria, despite concerns from teachers about whether I could succeed in a hearing school. My admission was conditional, and I had to demonstrate my ability through entrance tests in English and Mathematics. With support from the school principal, who encouraged the admissions committee to give me a chance, I passed and was admitted. Despite my experience learning sign language in a school for the deaf, at this stage, I had yet to embrace a Deaf identity. This period foreshadowed challenges of navigating institutions with different forms and degrees of ableism, and marked the beginning of deep personal growth and self-made academic progression.

My transition into university was experienced as a sustained liminal condition that was shaped by institutional invisibility, the absence of formal support, and lack of community. I was both a university student and not, a Deaf person and not. I will demonstrate this in two cases that emphasize anti-structure. Then, I will unpack the intersecting liminality of my college and disability transitions, and how the notable lack of communitas required me to become the structure for transition myself.

5.2.1 Case 1: Liminality at University. No disclosure pathway. When I arrived at a major public university in Abuja, Nigeria, the institution had no system for recognizing or supporting disability. This became apparent in the screening process, which is the formal credential verification process for all newly admitted students. The institution had not asked for disability disclosure during application and had made no provision for students with disabilities during screening.

Therefore, in the face-to-face meeting with the Faculty of Science admissions committee, I “pretended to be hearing, refused to disclose my hearing status, wore a hearing aid, asked other students who were screened about the questions asked through writing, and tried my best to impress the committee.” Mirroring the institution, I behaved as though disability did not exist: “At that time I had no knowledge or awareness about accessibility, and actually never disclosed my hearing status, seeing it as something to be ashamed of.”

I perceive this as a lack of structure that made it necessary for me to perform being a hearing student, though I could not hear and I could not participate fully as my peers. My reflective summary of the screening encounter captures this relationship between structure and liminal identity: “I think this shows anti-structure because I had to navigate the screening process by hiding my hearing disability instead of being supported through any formal accessibility system. My actions were shaped by fear of stigma, rejection, and a lack of disability awareness in the institution. Rather than the university creating space for disclosure and accommodation, I had to rely on self-protection and improvisation through the process.”

In, but not in, the classroom. This liminal position in the larger academic institution shaped how I occupied classroom space throughout the remainder of my time at university. On a daily basis, I was inside the classroom, but often only partially inside the flow of communication. Access to lectures was not organized through captioning, sign language interpretation, note-taking support, assistive listening systems, lecturer training, or any formal accommodation process. Instead, in the crowded lecture halls (Figure 3), access depended on whether I took the initiative to “go to the lecture halls early in order to sit in front,” read notes from other classmates during lectures, and infer missing information. I struggled to make sense of what lecturers were saying, especially when they only spoke or read from notes without writing on the board. It was only through sheer force of will that I persisted through my degree program.

“Beyond the lecture itself, participation extended into a second shift of labor: after class I bought handouts or went to the library to reconstruct what I had missed, and I relied on the student association's night tutorials in mathematics, statistics, and programming to recover content I could not hear. Access was not a place I entered but a state I had to keep rebuilding, hour after hour."

Again, the lack of formal structures to acknowledge and accommodate my disability constituted anti-structure. The result was enforced in-betweenness. I was neither fully excluded from lectures (as my Deaf counterparts outside the academy) nor fully included in them (as my hearing classmates). Instead, I occupied a threshold position where academic participation had to be continuously produced through personal effort.

This figure describes overcrowded tiered lecture hall with students seated closely together across many rows. The room appears densely packed, with limited space between students and long distances between some seats and the front of the classroom. The image illustrates conditions that can create accessibility barriers for d/Deaf students, including difficulty finding a seat with a clear view of the lecturer, board, slides, interpreter, captions, or classmates’ notes.

After graduating in 2013, I secured a temporary position as an information technologist at a hospital. I later completed national service and worked for a year as a computer studies teacher, teaching hearing students. This period reflects adaptation, academic discipline, self-management, identity formation, and post-graduation mobility. It shows how persistence and strategies of self-insfrastructuring gradually created opportunities for professional growth.

After returning to Nigeria from my Mandela Washington Fellowship, I had a stronger sense of self-esteem and comfort with my Deaf identity, but I also became more aware of the contradiction. I now understood what access could look like, but I returned to a system that still often struggled to see someone as both Deaf and a student, teacher, or professional. That tension is important because it shows how my Deaf identity developed through intersecting liminality: existing between Deaf and hearing spaces, Nigeria and the U.S., student and teacher roles, and personal accommodation struggles and community advocacy.

We translate our account into concrete institutional actions across the student journey:

At application/admission. Admissions materials should state that all applicants are welcome irrespective of disability, invite (but never require, and never penalize) voluntary disability disclosure so accommodations can be planned in advance, and commit to providing support to any admitted student who qualifies. Institution websites and admission forms should meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard [36, 44], so the disclosure pathway is itself accessible.

At screening/registration. Where an admitted student has disclosed a disability, accommodation should already be in place for credential-screening, which is the first high-stakes encounter, rather than left to the student to improvise.

In the classroom. Provide dedicated, reserved seating with clear sightlines and pair it with in-class access support (captioning, note-taking, or interpretation). Reducing lecture-hall density to improve the student-to-instructor ratio would further lower the burden that overcrowding places on visual access.

For staff. Universities should require basic disability-awareness and accessibility training for staff, especially instructors, so that access does not hinge on a student disclosing to each lecturer individually.

For community. Programs modeled on AccessComputing [1], adapted to low-resource contexts, could seed the peer community and Deaf communitas whose absence forced the self-accommodation we describe. Course-accreditation bodies should treat accessible provision as a standing requirement, not something triggered only once a disabled student appears [6].

The accounts analyzed in this work are retrospective reflections of one Deaf individual's lived experiences, drawn from events that occurred between nine and nearly thirty years prior to this writing. Because memory is susceptible to change over time, we selectively included only events that could be recalled with reasonable clarity. Additionally, because the first author's identity as a Deaf person became more fully developed in the years following many of the events described, our interpretations are outcomes of retrospective sense-making. These conclusions were unlikely to be available to the first author at the time the events originally transpired.

Future work within the broader HCI and ICT4D research community (e.g., venues such as ASSETS, ACM COMPASS, and ICTD) should examine how the dynamics documented here apply to students with other disabilities across other countries and cultures, especially in low-resource communities, and whether collective accounts reveal shared structural patterns. International surveys could examine the experiences of DHH students and students with other disabilities navigating similar low-accommodation transitions across sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South, to examine whether self-accommodation is a shared structural phenomenon rather than an individual trajectory. Longitudinal design studies could then co-develop culturally appropriate, lightweight accessibility tools and institutional disclosure pathways that do not require formal infrastructure to function.