Automating Interior Design for Wheelchair Accessibility: A Case Study of a STEM Laboratory

Persons with disabilities (PWDs) face significant barriers in education and career development, especially due to inaccessible laboratory environments that limit their ability to acquire essential skills. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) laboratories, crucial for hands-on learning and professional preparation, are often not designed to meet the diverse needs of PWDs due to the complexity of laboratory operations. This study addresses these inequities by focusing on a soils laboratory as a case study for wheelchair users. The authors developed a design guideline based on the laboratory’s operations and created a programming toolkit to automate the design of interior elements for improved accessibility. Our work demonstrates the technological plausibility of automating STEM laboratory designs and making them accessible and inclusive for wheelchair users, thus enabling those users’ full participation in STEM education.