AccessSTEM

The institution is required by federal regulation to establish formal grievance procedures for providing prompt and equitable resolution of disagreements. When a dispute involves the conduct of a course or academic program, those procedures provide for consultation between the faculty member responsible for the course, the student, and a representative from the disabled student services office. Contact your disabled student services office to learn about the grievance procedures on your campus.

An instructor is typically required to allow a student to tape record her course if taping the class is determined to be an appropriate accommodation for a student's disability. Tape recorders are specifically mentioned in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act as a means of providing full participation in educational programs and activities. Occasionally, classroom discussion reveals items of a personal nature about students.

Privacy of student information, including that regarding student's disabilities or accommodation needs, should generally be handled according to guidelines of FERPA, the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Personal information of this nature should only be shared with those people within the institution who have an educational need-to-know.

The Linux Operating System has become increasingly popular on servers and desktop systems, in part because it's freely distributable and open-source and it runs on a variety of hardware platforms. For several years, a number of accessibility-related tools have existed for Linux, but most of them made the console, the DOS-prompt-like environment, accessible. Until recently, GUIs and graphical desktops on Linux, which behave similarly to those on Windows® or Mac®, have remained inaccessible to users with various disabilities.

"Accessibility Rallies" represent a promising practice for promoting accessible web design. This article describes the Georgia Accessibility Rally (GAR), which was designed to create new, accessible Internet sites for rural Georgia schools, train students in accessible web design techniques, and build the capacity for teachers and administrators to create accessible information technology opportunities for all students.

The following publication content was developed through a joint project between AccessIT and the ADA and IT Technical Assistance Centers.

Microsoft® Word is the world's most popular word processing software application, and files created with Word (typically ending in .DOC or .DOCX) are common as a means of distributing materials over the web, including materials used in education.

Growing numbers of educational entities at all levels are embracing the web for delivery of curriculum, as well as for administrative functions, outreach, and communication. Delivering web-based content to a variety of audiences demands a respect for the varieties of technologies that people use to access the web. In addition to the standard combination of computer screen, keyboard, and mouse, many web users with and without disabilities use alternative devices both for providing input to the computer and for perceiving output from the computer.

The following content was developed through a joint project between AccessIT and the ADA National Network Centers.

Web accessibility is comprehensively covered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which includes guidelines and checkpoints (called success criteria). There have been multiple revisions of WCAG. Most laws, policies, and legal settlements or resolutions identify either WCAG 2.1 or WCAG 2.0 Level AA as the standard by which accessibility is measured.