Anna Voskuil | Copy Editor
Featured image | Rowan Campbell
Last semester—or, for the last two full years, to be precise—I knew that I was struggling severely with managing, remembering, and organizing my school work.
Once I was formally diagnosed with a learning disability this year, I knew the next logical step was registering with York’s Student Accessibility Services (SAS), to receive the accommodations I needed in order to have my level of learning on par with the rest of my class—in short, to receive the full education experience I needed and deserved.
However, from the moment I called SAS, a million-and-one winding and complex hoops to jump through were thrown at me, from very complicated forms to oddly-worded questionnaires, and a process that was rather difficult to understand—and that’s just to make an appointment with a disability counsellor and receive an accommodation letter.
I’d even go as far as saying that receiving accommodations from a professor directly was definitely a much easier, simpler process than receiving one from SAS, and this concerns me.
For a service made specifically for students like me in mind, I knew wholeheartedly that this wasn’t how it should be.
As I was going through this unnecessarily complicated process of garnering the tools I need to enhance my success, I kept thinking about how excluded it made me feel.
Having ADHD makes it difficult for me to concentrate on, remember, and organize the exact information of small, yet important details, especially when they are presented in a complex way—which they are in the forms, or in person with my counsellor.
In fact, I was very close to giving up when trying to claim my learning accommodations. It was far too much of a hassle trying to grasp something that could’ve been better explained through a step-by-step process and in plain language, but instead was unnecessarily complicated.
The fact that it was so difficult for me in this regard, and the fact that I knew that it could’ve been simpler, deeply upset me.
I also thought about how excluded students with learning, intellectual, mental, and/or physical disabilities may also feel, if they felt like giving up (like I almost did), rather than go through a process that doesn’t feel as if it was meant for them, despite the claims that it is.
Having a disability of any kind already makes us feel marginalized. I expect to feel that way almost anywhere I go, especially in a classroom—however, the very last place where I would expect to find myself feeling that way is in a service made specifically to help me and others like me; one that even has the word “accessibility” in its title.
To SAS, I respect your services and what you stand for. However, I am making a suggestion that you act on your word, in every step of the accommodation process, from start to finish.
Any and all instructions for applying students should be written in plain language, and every step of the process should follow a simple point-A to point-B model.
Overall, it needs to be more accessible.
