The College will implement a search to fill the position of assistant director of Student Accessibility Services, establish a note-takers program and provide informational material and workshops for faculty about accommodating students with disabilities, Provost Carol Folt announced in a campus-wide e-mail on Thursday.
The Accessibility Steering Committee, created by the Arts and Sciences Faculty's Committee of Chairs, was charged with identifying strategic initiatives to improve the overall student experience after it was founded last spring, Folt said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
College officials chose to begin developing the Committee's suggestions that were ready for immediate implementation, Folt said. The Committee comprised of 28 faculty, staff, administrators and Presidential Fellows is chaired by linguistics professor Christiane Donahue, who also serves as the director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
The new assistant director of Student Accessibility Services will act as a point of contact for students with cognitive or psychiatric disabilities, Folt said. The individual who fills this position will increase the College's ability to respond to students' needs by communicating with faculty members and administrators and ensuring that these students receive the accommodations required by law.
The assistant director will also work closely with the director of Student Accessibility Services in educational outreach efforts, policy development and policy implementation, according to Folt. College officials hope to fill the position by Fall term, she said.
College officials will also institute a note-takers program for students, Folt said. This program will exist within the Dean of the College's Office and will be coordinated by Inge-Lise Ameer, associate dean for Student Support Services, according to Folt.
While these are necessary changes, the College lags behind peer institutions in making adjustments for student accessibility, according to Emily Broas '11 and Rebecca Gotlieb '12, co-founders of Access By Leadership in Equity, a student organization that seeks to raise awareness about issues faced by students with disabilities.
Broas said Dartmouth is "playing catch-up" in regard to updating its accessibility measures.
"It's not like we're adding all these things to be generous," she said. "We're getting to the standard of what is acceptable for students."
A faculty subcommittee of the Accessibility Steering Committee which recommended the changes will develop informational materials for faculty members regarding their responsibilities for accommodating students with disabilities both in and out of the classroom, Folt said. This information which will include a collection of frequently asked questions and pedagogical guidelines will be available at the beginning of Spring term, according to Folt.
After the materials are distributed, Student Accessibility Services will work with the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, the Dean of the College's Office and the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity to organize workshops for faculty members that focus on accessibility-related issues, Folt said.
College-affiliated websites will also be made more accessible with a design that accommodates those who have impaired hearing or vision, Folt said.
The initiative will add captions to the College's YouTube videos and modify the websites' codes to be compatible with software that reads on-screen text aloud, according to Sarah Horton, director of web strategy, design and infrastructure at the College.
"It will be an ongoing process," Horton said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "But I think over the period of about two years, there will be a very focused effort on bringing everything into compliance so that our digital environment is accessible."
While these changes are "exciting," they emerged after years of pressure and many failed efforts to enact similar initiatives, Broas said. The committee is the culmination of prior fragmented efforts by the administration to address accessibility shortcomings, according to Broas.
Broas said she thinks the Accessibility Steering Committee has succeeded in enacting change because it includes "all of the relevant perspectives" from members of the College community, including students.
"It has a breadth that prior efforts haven't had," Broas said.
The new initiatives will benefit the entire Dartmouth community, not just students with disabilities, Gotlieb said.
"It's creating a community that's open to all its members and where all its members can have access to similar types of experiences," she said.
In order to further strengthen this sense of community, the issue of ability needs to be included in dialogues about diversity, Broas said.
"Different communities exist here," she said, adding that members of the College community need to be "cognizant" and "literate" regarding ability and accessibility issues. "There are many people who have been interested in improving our accessibility services for quite a while," Folt said. "It was with the establishment of that amazing working committee that they could bring initiatives forward to [College President Jim Yong Kim] and me, and we could identify ways to get started."
Donahue said she believes every student will benefit from "the new attention to teaching and learning" that will accompany the recent changes.
"I don't want preempt the process," Donahue said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth. "But briefly, we are focused on learning as much as we can about current faculty knowledge in relation to students with disabilities, then creating resources for faculty."
Janet Terp, senior assistant to the dean of the faculty for administration and development, who serves as the committee's vice chair, did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
