As students return to college or begin for the first time, they scurry to arrange their living spaces, resister for courses, and buy those dreaded books. Students who have disabilities have the extra responsibilitues to see that their needs for auxilary aids and services are met. While they may know they have a right to readers and adapted testing, they may not consider their need for assistive technology to make computers accessible on campus.
A piece of legislation which helps college students with disabilities receive AT is Section 504 of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Under Section 504, "no otherwise qualified" individuals with disabilities can be excluded "from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination" in any program or activity at an institution receiving government funding (U.S, Department of Education, 1991, p. 1). The law also requires that these educational institutions provide auxiliary aids and services in order for individuals with disabilities to access their programs. Furthermore, the 1992 Section 509 amendment mandates that entities receiving federal funds be given guidelines for making electronic and information technology be accessible to those having disabilities (Cunningham & Coombs, 1997).
Students must request specific accommodations from the institution and may be asked to provide evidence that the auxiliary aids are necessary. The regulations do not require that the auxiliary aids and services produce a performance level equal to those without disabilities. However, the aids must be effective, meaning that they must provide students with disabilities the opportunity to gain the same benefit or level of achievement as students without disabilities. While students may request specific aids and services, an institution may provide different aids or services, if they are equally effective as those requested. Aids must be provided at no cost to the student, and the cost of the aids may not be used as a basis for refusal of provision. Institutions may meet this requirement by helping secure funding from outside sources (e.g., vocational rehabilitation) (U.S, Department of Education, 1991).
In the past few years, college students with disabilities have used this legislation to gain access to computers on their campuses. Most of the complaints to the Office for Civil Rights have come from college students with vision impairments, claiming that their universities had violated Section 504 by not providing access to computers on campus through AT. In the OCR rulings, the institutions were required to provide AT to make at least one computer in each location accessible to students with disabilities. Furthermore, the adapted computers had to be available to students with disabilities during the same hours as computers are available to students without disabilities, and the colleges and universities were required to train students with disabilities in the use of AT (Cardenas, 1997; Palomino, 1992, 1994).
Go To Page: 1 2
