Disabled community at UW fears progress made during remote learning may diminish
By Grace McGuire, October 27, 2021
Located in the basement of Mary Gates Hall, the Disability Resources for Students office opened for in-person services Sept. 13, 2021. (Photo: Grace McGuire)
Historically, accessibility on the UW campus has been placed on the back burner. Now, the fight to maintain the positive changes regarding disabilities in higher education sparked by the pandemic has just begun for the disabled community.
Although an online learning environment exacerbated the challenges some disabled students experienced on a daily basis before the pandemic, for many others, remote learning not only aided their individual disability, but it also brought attention to the importance of providing accommodations for disabled students.
As UW enters its second month of fall quarter, the transition back to in-person learning has been challenging, but especially so for members of the disabled community who are once again struggling to get adequate accommodations in classrooms.
One of the most significant barriers confronting disabled students is the overload in accommodation requests that the short-staffed Disability Services for Students (DRS) is being inundated with.
“Disability Resources for Students (DRS) is experiencing a significantly high volume of requests and consultations. Staff are striving to be as timely as possible; however, you may experience a delay in communications,” is the message students are being greeted with on the DRS homepage currently.
According to Toby Gallant, the assistant director of the Student Disability Commission, the delay in communication has been detrimental to disabled students including himself.
A couple of weeks ago he needed an accomodation for mental health reasons, but was rejected because his request fell outside of the DRS timeline.
“It's this thing of like, you have to be disabled before the quarter so you can get those accommodations,” Gallant said. “But that's not what disability is. It's not fixed. It's not predictable. Anyone can be disabled at any point.”
According to Adiam Tesfay, the director of DRS, students must submit their accommodation requests and consult with DRS six weeks prior to the start of the quarter, making any requests that fall outside of that timeline increasingly difficult to fulfill.
“We always take requests, it just doesn't mean that they're likely to get them,” Tesfay said.
Adding to the roadblocks presented by DRS’s rigid timeline, students have expressed that there is a lack of transparency and communication between DRS, professors, and students that is rooted in a flawed system surrounding disability.
According to Kelly Mack, a third year PhD student at UW researching accessibility and adaptive technology with a focus on higher education, she has experienced first-hand the inadequacy of university’s system on multiple accounts since returning to campus.
Mack has low-vision and without alternative text for PDF files she is unable to read the assigned readings for class. She often requests that professors send the required readings to DRS to be converted, but this does not always happen.
“She assumed that since she sent them to DRS, she was good,” Mack said about a professor. “DRS never sent me anything. But in her mind, she had made the class accessible because she did what she thought she was supposed to do, and thought that the request would be fulfilled.”
The existing system for requesting accommodations with DRS is the same as it was before the pandemic. The student communicates with their professor after being approved by DRS for the accommodation and their professor is expected to make adjustments to the course accordingly.
Despite the unchanged system, the pandemic made educators question the if ways in which they were delivering material to their students was accessible in the first place according to Tesfay, an educator herself.
“Could I have been doing this differently?” Tesfay said. “How could I do it? So, I definitely think people have widened their scope of what it looks like to teach.”
According to Mack, the shift described by Tesfay was felt by disabled students whose needs are constantly fluctuating.
“During the pandemic was the first time that I had a professor sit down and tell us, you know, my class is probably not the most important thing going on in your life right now,” Mack said.
That shift in mentality, in some ways, has permeated the UW campus as in person instruction becomes the norm again.
“It's starting to be more of a conversation throughout campus rather than just in the disability community on campus, which I do think is great,” Gallant said.
Moving forward, Mack identifies the lack of resources and education surrounding disability as a point of weakness that needs to be addressed in order for these changes to remain.
“If you haven't been taught it, and you're trying to take some slides that you may have been using for the past five years, and you're trying to make them accessible on the spot, that can take a lot of time,” Mack said. “Versus if you construct them with accessibility in mind from the start, it's not as much of a lift.”
Still, there is a great deal of anticipation among the disabled community as they are already seeing elements of their pre-pandemic reality coming back.
“It was very cool to see that shift. Unfortunately, I am not sure if that mentality is going to stay coming back,” Mack said.