Universal design, applied to instructional delivery systems, can be a powerful way to promote greater access to information for a wide range of students. However, the assessment of this information is of equal importance. This article provides a brief review of current assessment practice in postsecondary settings, and explains how universally…

The Deaf Initiative in Information Technology (DIIT) was developed at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at the Rochester Institute of Technology through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant with goals including the provision of continuing education for deaf and hard-of-hearing professionals. Instructors skilled in sign…

A single-subject, alternating-treatments design was implemented for three adults with learning disabilities to compare the transcription of college-level texts using a speech recognition system and a traditional keyboard. The accuracy and rate of transcribing after editing was calculated for each transcribed passage. The results provide evidence…

Responses by 156 Canadian college and university professionals who provide disability-related services to students were used to construct, develop, and validate the Accessibility of Campus Computing for Students With Disabilities Scale (ACCSDS): Service Provider Version. This is a 19-item, self-administered tool that evaluates institutional…

Sixteen disability service providers from 2-year and 4-year public and private postsecondary institutions were divided into 2 focus groups, each with 8 participants. When asked to share their perspectives on the implementation of Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) on their campus, service providers described strengths and weaknesses of UDI,…

The dramatic increase in students with disabilities enrolling at institutions of higher education in recent years (9% of incoming freshmen) has created a need to see that college and university faculty are provided with the knowledge required to enable the success of these students and to comply with federal statutes, such as ADA and Sections 504…

In order to gain access to services at universities and colleges, students with learning disabilities must provide documentation of their disability. However, secondary schools are not required by law to provide the documentation often requisite at the postsecondary level. Also, it appears that secondary schools may collect even less psychometric…

The present study evaluated the utilization and perceived usefulness of recommendations made to college students as the result of an evaluation and subsequent diagnosis of a specific learning disability. Participants were 47 college students who had received a diagnosis of learning disability within the previous two semesters at a university…

This study is the result of a series of group and individual interviews in which 25 university students with a variety of disabilities discussed their experience of disability. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed qualitatively using an inductive procedure. Data were then sorted by gender and by hidden versus visible disability. Here we…

The following study explores faculty attitudes toward students with disabilities at a large research university. In the first phase of a three-year demonstration project, 14 instructional staff, including teaching assistants, faculty, and faculty serving as administrators, were interviewed to determine their informational needs and attitudes…

The purpose of this study was to identify variables that facilitate the academic success of college students with learning disabilities. Twenty recent college graduates with documented learning disabilities were interviewed using a semi-structured format. An analysis of the transcripts of the interviews revealed eight common themes, many of which…

The recent influx of students with disabilities into postsecondary education has generated a concomitant increase in the demand for psychoeducational assessments that include a measure of cognitive ability, either to identify ability-achievement discrepancies or to rule out alternate or comorbid diagnoses. The most commonly recommended cognitive…

Views and concerns of the professionals who deliver disability-related services at Canadian postsecondary education institutions about access to information and instructional technologies are presented. Findings are based on structured interviews with 156 individuals who represent 80% of the population of Canadian campus-based disability service…

This is an applied companion to our empirical article elsewhere in this issue (Fichten et al., in press) on technological needs and concerns of Canadian junior/community college- and university-based disability service providers. Here, we provide highlights of our findings as well as timely, practical recommendations to disability service…

This study provided a quantitative analysis of a random sample of 167 National Disability Law Reporter-published letters of findings by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in response to higher education student complaints under Section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Inasmuch as each letter of findings…