Schooling Accommodations, in My Experience

School's finally almost over and I am peeking my head out from under the mountains of homework that have been blocking out everything else and realizing that I still have a blog here. Hi!

I've still got my final exam this week, so I'm not really back quite yet, but my teacher asked me for feedback regarding my experience with the disabilities department and accommodations at my school, and I ended up writing quite the novel about it, so i'm going to cheat and paste that here and we'll pretend it's a real post until hopefully next week when my brain cells start readjusting to not being submerged in the workings of our american government.

This email is in response to the questions (summarized): Did the provided accommodations work for you? What has your accommodation experience been in other classes?


Hey there Professor,
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> For my needs, the transcripts were pretty perfect. There were a few misspellings and mis-transcribed words that I should have made note of at the time (in hindsight), but didn't because I was always able to figure it out.
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> I have experienced a bit of a spectrum when it comes to getting captions or transcripts in my other classes. I've taken a class with no audio/video to caption, a class that had at least 75% of the study materials as audio and video and everything was already captioned and transcribed as part of the software, and one class where we spent the entire quarter scrambling for me to have access to a very considerable amount of video content, which resulted in at least half of my assignments being late due to captioning delays. That teacher used Dropbox to deliver my captioned content separately from the standard class curriculum, which worked, but I really preferred the way you did it in this class, how transcript links were right there with the regular content. This class felt like you and the captioning department had it under control and in the rare instance when I didn't have a transcript, I really appreciated your responsiveness.
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> Other classes have had similar types of content, videos are common, especially through youtube. I've had to fight for captioned youtube videos previously because youtube does provide them automatically sometimes and the [disabilities department] thought that should suffice, but those auto-captions are TERRIBLE, usually with so many errors, I can't even begin to guess what is actually being said.
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> In that situation, I really wasn't satisfied with the [disabilities department]'s decision not to caption videos that weren't accessible to me (for the previously existing youtube craptioning), but my teacher determined that particular video wasn't essential, the material was covered elsewhere perhaps, so the point ended up being moot. I was frustrated, but it didn't end up hurting my grade in the end, thankfully.
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> There has been an issue with getting copywritten material captioned, because the [disabilities department] can't do it. In the past, I ended up sourcing my own transcript via google (for a popular movie) and for the other I hunted down and emailed the makers of the assigned independent documentary and when they got back to me they offered to send me a captioned copy... only two months after the class had ended. I forwarded the email to my teacher, so hopefully he can use it in the future, but at the time he ended up just altering the associated assignment for me.
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> And, since we're on the topic, I did have one other accessibility issue with this class. I had trouble with the media presentations because I have sensory issues, so I experienced the animations as nauseating and dizzying, and the text was tricky for me to sift through for all the differences: in font sizes, some bolded words, some italics, several pairs of parentheses and brackets and maybe a sentence fragment with an arrow in there, sometimes all on the same slide. I understand that these variations in the presentations are meant for keeping interest, and for highlighting important pieces of information, but I really couldn't comprehend it as it was. I ended up going through the presentations frame by frame and typing it all out, then studying from my text. I learn that way anyway, so it's wasn't a huge stretch in study habits, but if I could have had all that content in plain text form, it would have made that part of the class much more comfortable for me. I'll be asking my [disabilities department] counselor if this is something they can help me with in the future.
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Best,

Steph