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Disability is an often-overlooked aspect of diversity. Recent research has indicated that there are barriers to access and participation for disabled students inherent in the design of physics courses. To help counteract these barriers, universities are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled students. However, not all students use the accommodations they have access to because of social factors (e.g., disability stigma), and others do not have access to the professional diagnosis often required to access accommodations. The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of students who identify with a disability/impairment who were taking an emergency remote teaching (ERT) physics course in Fall 2020 to inform policies about providing access to students in future remote and face-to-face courses. In this paper, we present the prevalence and types of impairments disabled students in physics courses reported, their reported accommodation usage, and ethical considerations of this work. Overall, we find that disabled students represent a sizeable group in physics courses, and there are positive and negative reasons students did not use or request accommodations. 

Physics mentors play an important role in supporting students in postsecondary education and in their transition to graduate school and careers. The knowledge and beliefs physics mentors have about disability can affect how they mentor students with disabilities. We administered the Disability and Physics Careers Survey (DPCS) to 237 practicing physicists recruited through physics-specific listservs to measure their knowledge about disability and beliefs about the viability of physics careers for people with different disability diagnoses. This study compares practicing physicists’ varied knowledge about different categories of impairments and diagnoses, and their beliefs about the viability of future careers for students with specific impairments. We present our findings examining the knowledge of practicing physicists about disability, their beliefs about the viability of certain physics careers for people with disabilities, and how those beliefs may vary depending on their personal disability experience.