Privacy
Swarthmore College respects the privacy of its students. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) governs all student record information.
Students with blindness or low vision use a range of accommodations to enable them to access course material. By Federal law, students with disabilities must be given "substantially equivalent ease of access" to course material as any other student. At Swarthmore, students use screen readers and magnifying programs such as JAWs and ZoomText, Braille materials, audio recordings, tactile diagrams, scribes and notetakers. JAWS and ZoomText are installed on all campus public computers (only on PCs).
Some course material may take as long as 2-3 months to convert to an accessible format (e.g., audio recordings of math, science engineering books, brailled texts, tactile diagrams). Since each student's needs are unique, the Student Disability Service aims to give faculty members as much notice as possible if we anticipate that a student with a visual impairment will be enrolling in your class. Typically, we will help to set up a meeting between you and the student so that you can identify accommodations that will be most helpful without altering fundamental course requirements.
To learn more about legal issues and accessible course materials, please visit the National Center on Accessible Instructional Materials website.
Adapted with permission from DO-IT, University of Washington
If a student identifies to you as having a disability and expresses a need for accommodations, please ask whether the student has also registered with the Student Disability Service so that we can draft formal accommodations letters. We recommend that you schedule an individual meeting with the student so that the two of you can identify accommodations that will enable the student to access the course material without altering fundamental course requirements. We have found that even when multiple students have the same disability, each student often benefits from different strategies for accessing the material.
Swarthmore College respects the privacy of its students. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act governs all student record information.
Swarthmore College respects the privacy of its students. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) governs all student record information.