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ADA task force created to assist students with disabilities

Colleen Anderson, Staff Reporter

A new committee tasked with improving accommodations for students with disabilities has begun its work to bring the University of Toledo up to the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

David Cutri, director of internal audit and chief compliance officer, described the ADA as “a wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.”

While Cutri said the ADA shares many characteristics with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it differs in one significant way.

“In addition, unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations,” Cutri said.

UT currently has a nondiscrimination policy for ADA compliance, which states that “the university is committed to making reasonable accommodations and/or academic adjustments for all employees, students, or applicants with disabilities.”

The university also has an ADA Compliance officer and an ADA Compliance Committee.

The committee itself consists of 10 employees that, according to Cutri, “direct the planning and strategy for applying ADA across the university in the broad areas referred to above.”

Within the general compliance committee, a small working group has been created consisting of Cutri, Vice Provost Kelly Moore and Faculty Senate President Karen Hoblet.

“The objectives of this effort, generally, have been to assure compliance with the law, satisfy our students’ needs, safeguard faculty intellectual property rights, and include input from the necessary constituents,” Moore said in an email interview.

The working group’s objective is to examine a few key issues: the delivery of note-taking service to students with qualified disabilities, drafting a technology accessibility policy and notifying professors of students with disabilities in their class.

“We felt that this working group was the most efficient way of making progress in each of these areas,” Cutri said.

According to Cutri, the new working group creates no additional cost to the university, since it is part of the larger ADA Compliance Committee.

Cutri said the working group is currently finalizing the recruitment and staffing process for student note-taking.

“We are now in the planning stages of how to deploy the various alternatives for addressing note-taking so that student accommodations are met, and each college/faculty can participate in the determination of how best to meet student need,” Hoblet said.

Sybille Weck-Schwarz, a professor and one of the representatives for the college of natural sciences and mathematics in Faculty Senate, said there are some concerns among faculty about the difficulty of making their materials ADA compliant.

“We have a lot of faculty who are using a lot of technology, and they’re very concerned that they can’t handle the job,” Weck-Schwarz said.

One of the concerns she mentioned was a part of the policy that implied all professors had to be ADA compliant, whether they had students with disabilities in their classes or not.

“It was a suggestive policy, and the policy was referring to ADA compliance, and it seemed to suggest that everything that’s going online … they need to be ADA compliant whether there is a student in class who needs the compliant component or not,” Weck-Schwarz said.

The working group is currently addressing the concerns in the policy as part of their objectives.

“Dave Cutri is clarifying portions of the proposed ADA technology process in response to the various concerns,” Moore said concerning the current policy.

Closed captioning for videos was one of the specific issues that Weck-Schwarz brought up as a problem for faculty.

According to Weck-Schwarz, the videos are usually sent out through the Student Disability Services for closed captioning, which has to be paid for.

“If this had to be done for every class, we couldn’t pay for it,” Weck-Schwarz said.

One faculty member that Weck-Schwarz spoke with had captioned a video on their own, which proved to be a time-consuming endeavor.

“He did a fifteen-minute video, and he went to YouTube and had it closed captioned, and of course there were mistakes in there,” Weck-Schwarz said.

She said it took him an hour or two to fix the mistakes.

“So if they have to do that, they couldn’t do it on their own,” she said.

The drafting of the technology accessibility policy is also one of the objectives of the working group, which Hoblet said addresses “closed captioning, translating graphics, videos and other educational tools that faculty utilize on their Blackboard course sites.”

According to Cutri, the policy has already been drafted and is going through internal review.

“The bottom line is getting students the tools they need to be successful while respecting the intellectual property of faculty,” Hoblet said.

Following a meeting by the task force on Dec. 5, Moore said the policy has been drafted and is currently being edited and “provides a list of procedures that will allow us to comply with the note-taking obligations under the ADA, without having to resort to services such as Flashnotes.”

The working group was pulled together by Moore, according to Hoblet, and will disband once the issues are dealt with.

“I believe,” Cutri said, “that the three of us have gone to great lengths thus far to ensure that any foreseeable concerns from the students and the community are being addressed.”

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