Individuals with disabilities face difficulties maneuvering in the traditional lab and classroom setting. Generally, there are structural barriers that include lab tables that are too high or low for a person in a wheelchair, instruments that are difficult or impossible for a person with a mobility or vision impairment to manipulate, and lectures and multimedia presentations that are inaccessible to people with hearing or vision impairments. The specific problems and barriers that individuals with disabilities face are easier to understand and address if they're discussed by disability category. They have difficulty accessing videos, movies and other multimedia. They may also have difficulty understanding mathematical and scientific abstractions because of language limitations.
Some people have learning disabilities that negatively influence visual processing.
Such people would have problems understanding many materials that are presented in visual format, such as traditional text materials, videos and movies, graphs and charts. For people with visual processing disorders, there are barriers to understanding visual materials presented in lectures, labs, quiz sections and other real-time events, and problems completing homework assignments and exams. They also have problems reading printed materials. People with vision impairments have problems getting information from slides and overhead projections, videos and movies, and chalkboards. Lab access barriers include encountering safety hazards while maneuvering throughout laboratories that aren't properly laid out or that don't have appropriate labels on equipment, substances and potentially hazardous situations.