AccessCollege

Some students with disabilities have difficulty taking notes. For example, a student with an auditory processing problem may take few or unclear notes. Physical and hearing impairments may also limit speed and make note-taking difficult. A note-taking accommodation is intended to provide information that the student would have gotten on his own, if it were not for his disability. Common ways to provide note-taking accommodations include the following:

According to the website for the Americans with Disabilities Act:

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) prohibits discrimination and ensures equal opportunity for persons with disabilities in employment, State and local government services, public accommodations, commercial facilities, and transportation. It also mandates the establishment of TDD/telephone relay services.

Some learning disabilities make it difficult for students to acquire math skills. Students may not be able to fully understand mathematics content in standard print form because of the additional mental processing required to interpret math expressions. They may react to math problems on the page as signals to do something, rather than as meaningful sentences that need to be read for understanding. In particular, they may face difficulties with self-verbalizing math equations. Using synthetic speech to verbalize digital mathematics expressions may aid students with these challenges.

Yes, there are funds available specifically for producing captioning. While the U.S. Department of Education is still a major source of caption funding, a good deal of captioning today is made possible by corporate support. Corporate contributions supplement or match those allotted by a program's producer and its distributor (i.e., the broadcast or cable network or syndicator).

Distance learning courses may include web-based materials, videotapes and other multimedia, printed materials, video conferences, and telephone conferences. These courses should be accessible both to the students who use them and to the instructors who create them.

The best way to begin is to consult print and web resources for making distance learning materials more accessible to people with disabilities. You can find extensive resources at AccessDL, The Center on Accessible Distance Learning.

The rights and responsibilities of high school students with disabilities are different from those of college students with disabilities. Understanding the legal and practical issues involved can help students with disabilities successfully transition from high school to college.

Calculators are commonly used at every education level. Calculators that can perform statistical or scientific calculations, manipulate matrices, and plot functions on a graph are particularly helpful in the study of higher-level mathematics. Although most scientific or graphing calculators are not accessible to someone who does not have usable sight, there are options available that allow students who are blind to use these tools successfully.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in the 2015-2016 school year 19% of undergraduates in the United State reported having a disability.

According to the Office for Civil Rights:

Following the basic design guidelines listed below can help you create overhead visuals that are easily read by people of many different ages and abilities to read and see. Large print and well-organized visual aids are particularly helpful for some students with disabilities that affect their sight, learning, or hearing.