 It's important that people with disabilities are able to access programs and resources just simply as a matter of social justice. Cheryl Burgstahler, Director, Accessible Technology Services. Students with disabilities should... Cindy, Ph.D., student. Be able to articulate what they need. I think that's very crucial. Patrick Powell. We want to really educate diverse learners. Vice Chancellor, UW Tacoma. Students learn and definitely including people with disabilities. Words appear. Students with disabilities at the University of Washington, building teams for success. In a classroom. For students with disabilities, a successful academic experience requires teamwork. Team members are students, faculty, and the staff that support students with disabilities. My name is Robert Stacey. I go by Bob Stacey. I'm the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and I'm a Professor of Medieval European History here at the University of Washington. A lot of disabilities, of course, are invisible. We think about disabilities and we think about someone who is perhaps in a wheelchair or who has vision impairment or whatever. But oftentimes there are things like social anxieties that prevent them from participating comfortably in large groups. My name is Dan Comden. I'm the Access Technology Manager in the Access Technology Center in the basement of Mary Gates Hall. We're part of UW IT information technology in a unit called Accessible Technology Services. We do a number of different things in our department. One of the things that we do is provide access to academic technology for college students here at the University of Washington who have disabilities. The transition from the K-12 system into higher education can be a bit of a shock for some students. They come from a very supportive environment to an environment that is supportive but requires that the student really be their own best advocate. They have to seek out the services. The services are not just going to be delivered to them without them asking about it. So how does the process start? In college it begins with a student. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act or ADA, students with disabilities have the right to reasonable accommodations. Students have to play an active role in claiming that right. Their first step is to contact the office that provides accommodations which is sometimes called Disability Resources for Students or DRS. My name is John McGough. In DRS we work with students in every program across the university. That's undergraduate students, graduate students, students in professional programs like medicine or law. In working with our counseling staff, our counseling staff works to ensure that the students can access the classroom. That means that lectures are accessible to them. Students could include sign language interpreters or closed captioned videos. We work to ensure that their books are accessible to them. This could be textbooks in Braille or audio or many other digital formats. We work to ensure that clinical experiences and field trips are also accessible. My name is Shelby and my disability is dyslexia dysgraphia. dyslexia is basically where you can reverse words or leave words out. I always try and seek out where the disability department is. I feel like it's the first thing I need to do because if I don't have everything in order then I'm just going to suffer the way through college and I don't want to do that. Like try to set up my meeting with my counselor, try to find out like if I get all of my testing accommodations and then I ask them is there like anything else that I need to know about if there's something new. Besides verifying that a student is eligible for accommodations, documentation helps the student services counselor determine what that student might need. Counselor Christa Greer talks with students about specific accommodations. So I work with a couple different types of students. The first type of students with disabilities that I work with are those that have chronic health concerns. Perhaps they have arthritis where they can't manipulate a physical book or they can't carry the weight of their books on their back. So they're really just looking for an electronic only version. Perhaps the student might also have low vision where they need to have an electronic version that can be enlarged. The second type of students that I work with are by far the largest population and these are students with learning disabilities. I'm Richard Ladner, professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. If a student with a disability comes into your class it's always a good idea to ask the student what their needs are and try to make sure that you accommodate those needs. I've seen this done successfully a number of times by professors who have an interest in including all students in their class. I think all the materials in the class should be accessible, the website and so on. The assignments should be considerate of accessibility, of the exams as well. There's a wide range of accommodations. A power chair user rolls to an elevator. My name is Kayla and I have a form of muscular dystrophy so essentially I just use a wheelchair because my muscles are weak and I also have panic attacks and anxiety is my invisible disability. Some accommodations that I had were the physical space where I needed a desk that I could pull up to that would raise, that was adjustable. I would need to be able to physically get into the room, the classroom, very important and I got some writing accommodations that I had just in case I needed them. I also had certain accommodations about needing to take breaks and that's mostly due to my invisible disability so if I am having a panic attack I can leave the room and the instructor would know why. I'm Cindy and I'm a third year PhD student in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. I'm totally blind. DRS helped me to get accommodations in a few of my courses. They provided materials in Braille for me in a computer science course which was very helpful. They provided an assistant for me in a statistics course which was also very helpful because there were a lot of graphs and creating presentations using statistical software where I was best supported by having a student help me. Be clear about what you need and make sure you communicate frequently with your instructor and if you're not getting the accommodation that you need, let your instructor know. Our instructors are remarkable but very few are mind readers. Students have the right to choose if and when to disclose their disabilities. It's up to the student actually, the student whether they disclose or not their disability. If they do disclose it and they do indicate that they do have some accessibility issues then a conversation would be in order and if the student does not initiate it then probably you should not initiate it. So what I would advise is for professors to offer opportunities if they come across something that might be helpful for someone with a disability to offer it to the entire class like oh if you have a disability here's something on campus that might be helpful rather than kind of calling the student out. If students do decide to disclose a disability they should contact professors and disability services early, preferably before classes start. Sometimes accommodations require advanced notice. For example, books in alternate formats such as Braille may have to be ordered. Cindy walks down a hall. It's important that they engage with their disability service office as early as possible so that they can, if they need accessible academic materials the DS office can start creating those as soon as they know what books are needed. It's really important that it be a proactive instead of a reactive process as much as possible. Flexibility and communication are the tools needed for success. Cooperation between faculty, students and service coordinators is the key to making it happen. My name is Patrick Powell. I'm from University of Washington Tacoma. My responsibility is technology. I'm the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology. So it is really vitally important for us to provide equity and inclusion which include people with any kind of needs, learning disabilities, physical disabilities. I'm Cheryl Burgstahler at the University of Washington. Here I direct accessible technology services. My hope for students in our programs is that they'll develop some self-confidence, that they'll become self-advocates, that they'll really know what they need, whether it's technology or some other accommodation. And they'll feel like they can be successful because they know. They've practiced some of the things they have to do to be successful in college and careers and they know they can do it. For more resources about supporting students with disabilities, consult washington.edu slash d-o-i-t. This video is funded by Accessible Technology Services of UW-i-t. Copyright 2018, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged. Described by AudioWise.