The University of Michigan has launched a new Student Accessibility and Accommodation Services website to better support students with disabilities, combining resources from Services for Students with Disabilities, Academic Support and Access Partnerships, Testing Accommodation Centers and Adaptive Sports and Fitness on one site.
This change was prompted by SAAS wanting to renew its digital appearance to be more helpful and accessible for all students. In an email to The Michigan Daily, Chip Evans, assistant director of the Testing Accommodation Centers, wrote SAAS is excited for the launch and will continue to adapt to student needs..
“How we meet our students’ needs has changed since SSD was created decades ago, and how SAAS meets needs will undoubtedly shift in the decades to come,” Evans wrote. “We hope this digital space can also help build a stronger sense of community and belonging among disabled students at the University of Michigan.”
Evans wrote that the change would bring about greater accessibility for student resources.
“Our team knew for some time that we needed to update our digital presence to reflect our more holistic approach to student support,” Evans wrote.
LSA junior Maya Fakih, president of KinectAbility, a student organization that promotes awareness about student accessibility, said in an interview with The Daily she approves of the centralization of resources.
“Even I have struggled to help students find their accommodations, because it (was) literally everywhere,” Fakih said. “It was so difficult for me at first. So looking at it, I’m like, ‘Actually, this is pretty helpful.’ So it was a great idea.”
In an interview with The Daily, Business freshman Sam Bodine, co-president of Undergraduate Business Leaders for Diverse Abilities, said he thinks the website does a good job of meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines’ standards, which are international criteria for digital accessibility
“(The website) seems to hit all the four principles pretty well, which are perceivable, operable, understandable and robust,” Bodine said. “The headings and headers are in a logical order, the font is bold and easy to see and when you click on the embedded video of the main page, there’s automatically captions.”
Fakih said she believes the website still has room for improvement, specifically for visually impaired students who would benefit from additional audio options to navigate the website.
“I think websites like this, specifically for disability accommodations, need to have hearing and video options,” Fakih says. “Just because there’s an option that’s meant to help doesn’t always mean that it’s accessible.”
Daily Staff Reporter Addison Heindrichs can be reached at [email protected].
Related articles
