Faculty

Faculty are an integral part of providing accommodations. Accommodations are determined on an individualized basis and are meant to allow a student with a disability equitable access to a course or academic program. An accommodation should not compromise the essential elements of a course, and your input as the instructor is valued in this determination. If you have concerns about recommended accommodations as they apply to your course, please contact us.

Student Accessibility Services determines eligibility for accommodations, but the implementation is often up to faculty and teaching fellows in the classroom. Below is information for common academic accommodations that may arise in the classroom. This list is not exhaustive.

Accommodation Letters

Students that are registered with SAS and eligible for academic accommodations will receive an electronic accommodation letter each semester. Students are responsible for providing faculty with this letter. If you receive requests for academic accommodations, you should require that students provide you with an accommodation letter prior to the implementation of accommodations. Students will receive electronic accommodation letters each semester, but you may request paper letters as they were delivered in the past.

Notetaking Assistance

SAS may hire notetakers for eligible students as an accommodation. There may be times when we need faculty help in identifying possible notetakers, in which case, we would kindly request that you make an announcement to the class or recommend specific students for the role. If we need your help, we will forward you verbiage for an announcement.

SAS may approve eligible students to record lectures in conjunction with notetaking technologies we offer. Any student who is approved to record lectures will have this accommodation on their accommodation letter, and will also provide faculty with a signed Record Lecture Agreement, outlining their responsibilities.

Course Materials

Whenever possible, please provide course materials in an accessible format (e.g., a Word doc instead of PDF). SAS will coordinate the conversion of inaccessible materials for students registered with our office. You can check the accessibility of your course materials by consulting the tool Ally, which is installed in your Canvas course site. For more information about this tool you can consult the Canvas instructor guidance for using Ally help page or email michelle.morgan@yale.edu.

Most common accessibility to keep in mind: PDFs and word documents with accessibility features built-in and videos with captioning.

For more information, please see the Faculty Guidebook.