Five years ago Christina Beck suffered a workplace injury to her head. What doctors initially advised would be alleviated with rest turned out to be a traumatic brain injury. Warned that she might spend the rest of her life mostly bedridden, Beck resolved to do what she thought would prove most neurologically difficult: enroll in New York University’s School of Professional Studies.
“What’s the hardest thing I could do for my memory and for my brain?” she thought. “Probably going to a school that’s pretty hard.” Doctors told her it would be the most expensive mistake she ever made.
When things are disorganized ... they spend the entire class trying to make sense of what’s happening.
Brain trauma affects Beck’s sense of time, impedes her short-term memory, and often has her in pain from being upright throughout the day, with excruciating migraines. She has trouble focusing on two things at once, so she records classes and sometimes relies on classmates for notes.
Students with disabilities face significant challenges under the best of circumstances. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has forced a mass, abrupt shift to online learning, disabled students and their advocates are finding they must sometimes fight to ensure access needs aren’t overlooked by faculty members who are struggling to adapt to a whole new arena of teaching.
Some professors will officially sign off on accommodations with their college’s center for disabilities but won’t follow through, says Beck. “They feel like you’re getting an advantage that other people don’t have, so they shouldn’t be giving it to you.”
Organization is key in classroom teaching, and for students with learning disabilities or brain injuries, that significance is amplified in a virtual setting. According to the National Center for College Students With Disabilities, about one-fifth of undergraduates and 12 percent of graduate students have some kind of disability. For many of those students, the nationwide shift to online learning brings additional accessibility problems.
“When things are disorganized, they can’t make sense of it. So they spend the entire class trying to make sense of what’s happening or what’s going on instead of what’s the information that’s being relayed,” says Beck, co-president of NYU’s Disability Student Union.
‘Access Needs’ vs. ‘Accommodations’
Many students with disabilities rely on accommodations to help navigate the classroom experience, including note-takers, teaching assistants, and the generosity of classmates.
Accommodations are sometimes mistaken for what are called access needs, according to Lydia X.Z. Brown, an adjunct lecturer in English at Georgetown University and a longtime disability activist.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
“Access needs” are those that are necessary to be able to engage with the world, such as requiring content in a tactile format because of blindness or poor vision. An “accommodation” is an attempt to enhance accessibility through an environmental or communicative change, such as attaching a ramp to a building constructed with stairs, Brown explains, anticipating students’ “new access needs” in the shift to virtual learning.
“I’m likely the only openly disabled person who will ever teach them in college,” says Brown, who is autistic and neurodivergent. Brown prefers the personal pronouns “they” and “their.”
Brown has found the online shift difficult, particularly with how their attention-deficit disorder, or ADD, clashes with organizing class content and discussion forums.
“I have to contend with how my ADD affects handling the creation of a whole lot of new discussion forums,” Brown says. “For people who have ADD, having to keep track of that many different little things like that, in a timely fashion, without the external reinforcer of having a set meeting time or something like that, is pretty hellish.”
Brown likes to draw a divide between, on the one hand, disability rights — advancing the cause of disabled people as a civil right and a human right — and, on the other, disability justice, which is concerned with the radical transformation of society and culture. “They are not the same thing,” they note. “You can’t legislate morality.”
Beck, the NYU student, got a taste of that difference while taking an online class before the pandemic. She was having trouble understanding a professor’s instructions and requested an in-person sit-down for clarification.
The meeting had been proceeding like any other between professor and student, with a natural back and forth of examples, questions, and answers.
It was “like we were interacting or collaborating,” says Beck, who then mentioned her head injury to try to help the professor better understand her situation. The attempt backfired. “Her whole body language completely changed,” Beck says.
Under federal law, the individual needs of students with disabilities are required to be met, including the provision of auxiliary aids and services that are necessary for equal opportunity.
The Americans With Disabilities Act protects “a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.”
Between her autism and dyslexia, Val Erwin, a doctoral student in higher education at Bowling Green State University, has trouble processing what she hears in class, so she uses techniques such as lip-reading to enhance her comprehension.
“I’m both listening to them and also reading their lips to get a full picture,” explains Erwin. “If half of that is missing, it’s more difficult. Or if they’re not aligned, then it’s even worse.”
Accessibility and the Web
Nadine Vogel, chief executive of the disability advisory firm Springboard Consulting, says accessibility was problematic long before Covid-19 upended higher education. She says that many colleges do not meet the accessibility guidelines laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative, which strives to make online content accessible to all.
Blind or visually impaired students rely on accessible web content. Screen readers, auditory tools equipped with speakers that read information aloud, help visually impaired students by also altering text size, color contrast, and background images. But the tools can be blocked, depending on the coding of a college’s website.
Marnel Jean is a low-vision music student at Miami Dade College who relies on a variety of access services, including a note-taker, a closed-circuit monitor, and screen-reading and screen-magnifying software called ZoomText. “The transition to remote learning makes me anxious because I don’t know how the whole process will work for me,” Jean wrote in an email. “I’m especially anxious about my accommodations and what services will be provided during tests or assignments.”
Advocates say that faculty members should be especially considerate of disabled students’ needs when incorporating external sources into assignments.
“While maybe the software you’re using for the teaching is accessible, maybe that external source isn’t,” says Joseph Chica, a Purdue University graduate student in finance who is blind. He is concerned about ensuring extra time on exams but says he feels comfortable with the online switch, thanks to technological training he grew up with at the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a program that provides instruction in assistive technologies. “Avoiding photographs and screenshots is critical,” he says.
Virginia Jacko, chief executive of Miami Lighthouse, encourages faculty members and administrators to be sensitive to accessibility when loading modules onto online-learning platforms. She says installing prompts that ask for alternative text before uploads would be an effective way to ensure access for blind students. That’s a feature visually impaired people have been requesting, says Jacko, who hopes the mass shift to virtual learning can help spur a long-awaited access movement for disabled students.
Blind students rely heavily on their screen readers to pick up on alternative text and other descriptions that convey the content of the images that faculty members post.
“The way a blind person interacts is you’re going to use keystroke commands to query the monitor, and then the monitor will give you the auditory feedback,” says Jacko.
Students as Their Own Advocates
One concern is that some students may have trouble expressing their access problems to faculty members and colleges. Yet the onus in the push for inclusivity often falls on the students, as most offices for students with disabilities serve as intermediaries between them and their professors, or between students and other potential support systems.
Vogel, of Springboard Consulting, says that, ideally, the onus should fall on student-disability offices. “It would be my personal hope that the office would reach out to students,” she says.
Students’ difficulties could be amplified when professors have little experience in conducting online classes. But Mara Mills, an associate professor at NYU who works in disability and media studies, says that, given the compressed time frame, professors should double down on their strengths instead of trying to completely revamp how they teach.
Live teleconferencing, ubiquitous in higher education since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, proves especially problematic for deaf students, who would need a sign-language interpreter or live captioning to understand lectures. Automated captioning tends to be riddled with errors.
Kristie Orr, director of disability resources at Texas A&M University at College Station and board president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, is very much aware of the disadvantages of synchronous classes to students who are hard of hearing. But she says that “it can be done and it has been done before. It’s just much more challenging.”
Some faculty members are opting out of recording their lectures for fear of having their words weaponized against them by conservative groups.
Orr suggests that educators upload notes to help students who rely on note-takers. She says accommodations might shift in the new environment.
“Depending on the format of the class,” she says, “the student who needed a note-taker before may not need one now, or they may not have needed one before, but now they need one.” Keeping videos short can help students with disabilities that hinder concentration, Orr says. “We want to make sure they have access to their education and that we’re not providing barriers for them because of the format of a class or because of the way it’s taught.”
Clarification (4/8/2020, 11:04 a.m.): A quotation attributed to Virginia Jacko about the need for alternative-text prompts in online-learning platforms has been removed because she misspoke during an interview.
