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Maintaining confidentiality is crucial to creating an environment where students feel respected and protected, while also meeting our legal obligations.

Information on a student's IEP or 504 from the K-12 setting is not automatically shared with the institution. Students have the right to decide whether to disclose their disability and to register with the Learning Access Program to receive accommodations. Students are not obligated to share their diagnosis and/or medical documentation with faculty and staff outside of our office, and this information cannot be requested by faculty.  

Students with approved classroom accommodations should provide their faculty with a Letter of Accommodation either in-person or via email. Accommodations are renewed every semester; if you do not receive an accommodation letter for the current semester, please tell the student to contact the Learning Access Program for an updated letter.Accommodations should not be provided unless this formal communication has occurred. 

It is the faculty members' responsibility to provide accommodations once they receive the letter. Keeping a record of your students’ Letters of Accommodation will assist you in ensuring that accommodations, such as extra time on exams and quizzes, are applied to all exams throughout the semester. It is not the student's responsibility to remind the faculty member of their accommodations throughout the semester.

If you believe an accommodation causes a fundamental alteration to your course, please contact the Learning Access Program directly to discuss. 

Students who seek classroom accommodations while attending Ģ������Ƶ must register with the Learning Access Program. If a student self-discloses their disability to you, but does not provide you with a letter from the Learning Access Program, please direct them to contact LAP to schedule an intake appointment. Faculty should not provide unofficial accommodations to a student who is not registered with LAP.  

Students should be referred to the Learning Access Program if: 

• An accommodation has been requested, but the student has not provided you with a Letter of Accommodation
• A student discloses that they have a disability, but has not registered with the Learning Access Program
• A student discloses that they think they have a disability, but have never been diagnosed
• You believe a student already working with our office may benefit from a follow-up meeting with a Coordinator and/or additional support

Note: The Learning Access Program will not provide specific updates about a student's status after a referral is made. 

If a student has a testing accommodation and will be using the Learning Access Program Testing Center, they should discuss exam scheduling with their faculty and complete the Testing Accommodation Scheduling Form together. 

Students should meet with their professor to identify the date, time and instructions needed for the exam. The professor will need to complete and sign the form and then return it to the student either in person or electronically. 

Students will need to log into the Accommodate portal and schedule their exam online to reserve their seat in our Testing Center. Once the appointment is requested, students need to return the Testing Accommodation Scheduling Form either in person or via email to laptesting@stockton.edu.

Once the test is scheduled with the Learning Access Program, it may not be changed by the student. If they arrive more than 20 minutes late, the professor will be contacted to grant permission to start the exam late. If the date or time of the scheduled testing appointment changes, the change must be submitted in writing to laptesting@stockton.edu by the professor. 

If a student is approved to receive peer notes as an accommodation and would like to request note takers for their courses, they should complete the  after attending their first week of classes. Students should complete this form for any Face-to-Face, Live Synchronous Zoom Sessions, and/or Live Hybrid Sessions courses for which they are requesting a peer note taker; they should not include any classes for which a peer note taker is not needed. The Learning Access Program will facilitate the process of locating a peer note taker who is enrolled in the requested course. Faculty members are not responsible for hiring a note taker. If faculty assistance is needed to obtain a note taker, the Learning Access Program will contact them. 

If a student is approved to use a note taking software, they will need to have an electronic device (i.e., laptop, tablet, phone, etc.) on their desk. This will be indicated on the accommodation letter.

When utilizing electronic documents, websites, podcasts, or videos it is important to ensure that the material is accessible.

Electronic documents and other informational materials need to be readable by a screen reader. When documents are photocopied and/or converted to PDF, they become unreadable to a screen reader. Faculty who would like to use an excerpt from a book should try to locate the electronic copy and provide students with a link to the accessible text. If an accessible electronic copy is not available, the scanned PDF needs to be converted to either an OCR Acrobat file or a Word Document. This document can be created in the library utilizing the ScannX computers. Please note that the document should be reviewed for accuracy after it is converted to an accessible format.

Students may be eligible for a variety of assistive technology tools provided by The Learning Access program.  Items you may see include: FM or personal amplification systems, Spellex pocketmed spelling assistant, digital recorders, laptops and tablets that assist with recording and note taking. 

If a student has audiobooks included in their Letter of Accommodation, the Learning Access Program will provide the audiobooks for the course.  The faculty member does not have to obtain the audiobook for the student.

If you have a no-electronics policy in class, please do not tell students that the use of electronics is only permitted for students with accommodations.  We request that you use the technology statement. This statement does not identify the student in your course who utilizes technology as a student with a disability.

A variety of digital accessibility tools are available on the Accessibility Tools page. 

You should always include an alternative (alt) description with any image. Here are some tips to help you create accessible and meaningful alternative descriptions:

• Explain images in the context of the surrounding text
• Be mindful of users with screen readers, don’t say: “Image of,” “Picture of,” “Banner,” etc.,​ as a screen reader already tells the user it is an image or graphic
• Some images automatically include alt text. Please remember to confirm that the automatic alt text is correct

If you have created your own video, you can upload it to your YouTube account and have it auto-captioned. The captions should be reviewed by the faculty or staff member to ensure accuracy. Changes can be made to the captions provided by YouTube.

How to post a video:

1. Prepare the file; once the video is complete and does not require additional edits, you should save it in one of the supported files (MP4, M4V, MOV, WMV, or AVI)
2. Log in to your YouTube account
3. Click the upload button
4. Choose the correct file and click Open/Choose
5. There will be some required information about the video, which includes the title, description, tags, etc
6. Choose privacy settings; Unlisted videos are only accessible by those who have the exact video link
7. Click Save

How to caption a video: 

The video  will walk you through the steps to caption your personal videos. Please note this is only for videos that you have created and cannot be done for general online videos. 

There are four basic font groups: those with serifs, those without serifs, scripts and decorative styles. When creating reading material, sans-serif fonts (e.g., Arial, Calibri, Verdana) are more legible than serif fonts (e.g., Times New Roman), scripts and decorative styles. For more information and references on font choices, please visit the site below:  

 

When adding colored text to a document, choosing the right color combination is important for students who are colorblind or color-sensitive. Traditional black/white or blue/white is the recommended color scheme. Color combinations to avoid include: green/red, blue/purple, and green/black, to name a few. For more information and resources, please visit the sites below: 

      

Students with a written accommodation to record classroom material have difficulties attending to the lecture content and writing clear, logical notes at the same time. The audio recording allows the student to 'fill in the gaps' after the lecture or clarify the meaning in their written notes.

Can a faculty member forbid a student from recording in the classroom?

No, if recording has been approved as an accommodation for the student’s disability to provide meaningful access to the educational experience. The recording of lectures is one of the accommodations specifically mentioned in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The issue of copyright as a concern is referenced in 84.44 of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (P.L. 93-112, amended P.L. 93-156).

In order to allow a student with a disability the use of recording and, at the same time, protect the instructor, the institution requires the student to sign an agreement so as not to infringe on a potential copyright or to limit freedom of speech.

Consistent with the Regulation in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973:

1. Students with disabilities who are unable to take or read notes have the right to record class lectures only for personal study purposes.
2. Lectures recorded for personal study may not be shared with others without the consent of the lecturer, and this includes other students within the same class.
3. Information contained in the audio-recorded lecture is protected under federal copyright laws and may not be published or quoted without the express consent of the lecturer and without giving proper identity and credit to the lecturer.

Classes Involving Self-Disclosure from Students

Occasionally, classroom material may involve a great deal of self-disclosure from students as part of the class, which is not material that should be used towards an assessment in a class. The use of a recording device is to replace the student’s note taking ability. If these open discussions are not appropriate subject matter for any student to take notes, faculty may issue a general announcement to the class to request that any students who are using a recording device turn it off. Students are required to comply with a directive to turn off the recording device.

Student Responsibility

Students must agree to the following the statement, and this information is kept on file with the Learning Access Program.

I understand that these recordings are for my own personal use ONLY. The class lectures as presented are the professor's intellectual property, and my classmates' comments are their own intellectual property. I agree that I will not share or transfer these recordings by any method currently available or any method that may become available in the future. This means I will not give the recordings to others (even those that are in the class), upload them to file-sharing sites, post them on the internet, provide them to journalists, or share them in any other way. Violation of this agreement could harm my grade or bring other sanctions, depending on the violation.

Recorded material may not be used in any way against the faculty member, other lecturers, or students whose classroom comments are recorded as part of the class activity. Information contained in the recording is protected under federal copyright laws and may not be published, placed on social media, shared through other electronic devices or quoted without the express consent of the lecturer and without giving proper identity and credit to the lecturer.

I understand that I am responsible for returning any recordings provided at the semester's conclusion and/or erasing all recorded lectures. I agree to abide by this agreement with regard to any recorded material lent by my faculty and lectures I record while enrolled as a student at Ģ������Ƶ.

Adapted from:

Rocketbook Beacons turn traditional whiteboards into smartboards by integrating with popular cloud services inside the Rocketbook app. Beacons have been placed on whiteboards throughout campus to help with note-taking and retention of information written on them.

The role of the interpreter in the classroom is to facilitate effective communication between deaf individuals and hearing individuals.  Below are two documents from the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes to help explain what interpreting entails and the role of an interpreter in the classroom. 

Zoom offers live automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts for meetings and webinars. Please note that this service creates machine-generated transcriptions; their accuracy is not perfect, and they need to be remediated before providing a copy to students. For information on how to turn on this feature, please visit ITS Training Tips.