 A woman in a wheelchair rolls to an elevator. Graduate students with disabilities, working with faculty in disability services, can have successful graduate school experiences, complete their degrees, and go on to rewarding careers. In an office, a woman types, words appear. Graduate school and students with disabilities. My name is Kayla and student. 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 as my invisible disability. Graduate school was very daunting. I didn't know what to expect and I think that, you know, when you have a disability, that stress is just amplified. My name is Shiri Azenkant. I'm an assistant professor at Cornell Tech. I started researching graduate programs and I actually found Richard Ladner's work online and I started reading about it and I just had this moment where things clicked and suddenly I realized, wait a second, I don't like assistive technology but I can actually change that and make it better. I'm Dr. Taffy Kenean and I'm the assistant dean director of the Office of Disability Services at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Anyone looking at graduate school, just understanding that it's a lifestyle commitment, right? It's not something that you're going to do on the side. This is going to be something that you're going to be integrating fully into your life and so understanding how that is, you know, how you're going to navigate that with your disability. 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. The GRE does have a department for requesting accommodations and it does take extra time so I allowed about six months of planning. I think the earlier the better and the more sort of creating that team of support is always going to be important for any student with disabilities and so finding those faculty members, finding those staff members, finding those peers, you know, that sort of create that environment of support for that student is going to be important for their success as they move forward. Some students may find they need different accommodations than those they use during their undergraduate work. I knew myself a whole lot better. I knew what accommodations I needed, how I could best learn and I knew how to communicate my disability better and tell other people how I could best learn and also the type of learning that was required was completely different. My name is John McGough and I'm the Associate Director of Disability Resources for Students here at the UW Frequent Accommodations and Graduate School could be looking at the timeline toward degree completion, setting up a process so that students and faculty can exchange information and work toward the goal of defending a thesis, for example, and this may take longer depending upon the student's experience and condition. In a lecture hall, faculty and staff can provide support for students with disabilities by creating a welcoming climate. Getting to know the person as an individual rather than seeing them as a diagnosis or a set of impairments and getting to see the whole person, you know, what their strengths are, what their challenges are. I'm Richard Ladner, Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. 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. If you do have a National Science Foundation grant and that student does have an access need, then you can apply for a supplement for your grant through the VACID program, F-A-S-E-D. I actively recruit students with disabilities. I've had students with, I had one student who had very severe dyslexia and that was really interesting because he actually showed me a few tricks for how to read things more effectively. And we were also able to brainstorm some really interesting project ideas for technologies for reading better with audio output. So that was a lot of fun. For more resources for students with disabilities, consult uw.edu.accesscomputing. This video presentation was created with funding from National Science Foundation grant number CNS-153-9179. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this video are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2017, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes provided the sources acknowledged. Described by AudioLyres.