Setting up Accommodations (for Students)

If you have a temporary health condition or permanent disability (either mental health, learning, or physical health related) that impacts your academic experience, please let us know how we can accommodate you. You are NOT obligated to disclose any of these issues with the instructor, only specify if there’s any accommodations required.

If there is something we can do to make your experience better, please let us know. We have attempted to make all the course materials accessible according to web standards but there are always things we may not have thought of.

If you need any additional support, we are always happy to work with you directly or through Disability Resources for Students (DRS) to make sure that the class meets your needs. If you need any adaptations for course materials (large font, pacing, image description, closed captioning), just let the instructor know.

If you have not yet established services through Disability Resources for Students (DRS), but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), contact DRS directly at uwdrs@uw.edu to set up an Access Plan. DRS facilitates the interactive process that establishes reasonable accommodations. DRS offers a wide range of services for students with disabilities, mental health concerns, and chronic illness, that are individually designed and remove the need to reveal sensitive medical information to the course staff, but it is important to start the process as soon as possible to avoid delays.

Mutual Commitment to Access in the Classroom

We start every quarter by asking students and instructors to participate in a shared effort to ensure that the classroom is accessible to all of us. We commit to working together to try to meet these requests without judgement or required documentation (Documentation, and DRS approval is only required when an accommodation is available to some students but not others).

This quarter’s list of accommodations can be found on our poll everywhere summary in our first class’s accommodation discussion. Some examples of things that participants have asked for in the past include

Making your Assignments Accessible (for Your Instructors)

Please ensure that assignments you hand in are accessible to the best of your capabilities. We will offer guidance on this in class, but given that the process of making content accessible heavily depends on the tools you use to author the content, it is practically impossible for us to offer exhaustive guidance. Here are a few resources to get started, but please reach out to us when in doubt.

Accessibility Resources that might be useful

Some accessibility technologies that students have told us are helpful in the past include the following. Note that these products can cost money, and we are not necessarily endorsing them. In addition, sometimes it’s more useful to know a type of product exists and search for the most recent example of said product – in other words, some of these resources may be out dated :).