Is your library a friendly environment for students with disabilities? Like most media specialists, you have good intentions. But you’re probably on a tight budget and can’t afford to purchase special resources or equipment. Moreover, you lack the time to cater to such a small minority of students. At least that was my experience. I once had a seventh-grade student who had a personal frequency modulation system to help her hear in class. But the self-conscious girl did everything she could to avoid wearing the device. “I left it in my locker,” she would say, or “the batteries are dead.” So I excused her. After all, it was her responsibility, right? I still think about that student. Often. Because in 2001, my two-year-old son became ill and lost virtually all of his hearing. Just like that, I was on the other side of the special needs issue, arranging for an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for my own child. It was an eye-opening experience. While the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have made it easier for those with impairments to use public facilities, there’s still much that can be done to help students with special needs access their own schools, including the library. That doesn’t necessarily mean having to purchase expensive, high-tech equipment to serve one child out of 500. In many cases, there are small, no-cost changes that can make a world of difference to those with disabilities and benefit the greater student population, as well. Where to begin? Start with yourself. The most important change you can make is in your attitude. Consider your own thoughts about students with special needs. It’s not enough to simply be tolerant, you must be proactive. Next, educate yourself. Librarians are natural experts here because we know how to access quality information. Start small—learn about your own students first. As a media specialist, you probably already collaborate with classroom and content-area teachers. Well, here’s your chance to reach out to the special education staff. They are experts not only in making accommodations for disabilities in general, but they also know individual student’s strengths and weaknesses, inside and out. So seek out their advice. Better yet, attend the in-service training sessions that they offer to teachers on children with special needs and equipment. In my case, I met with a speech-and-language teacher to learn more about a particular student with limited verbal skills. She and I then created a special signboard so the student could point and indicate whether he wanted to check out, renew, read, or look for more books on dinosaurs and other topics of interest. Finally, share your knowledge with your library staff. In both school libraries in which I’ve worked, our aides worked as closely with students as I did. It’s imperative that their attitudes and interactions with students reflect informed understanding.

Integrate Universal Design

After you’ve tapped into your school’s resources and learned about the needs of your students, start looking to make those small changes that will benefit everyone. Many adjustments are simple and inexpensive, yet can make a huge difference for someone with a disability. That’s the underlying principle behind universal design, which enhances usability of objects and environments for all people. You’ve no doubt encountered examples of universal design before—the lever handle on a door instead of a knob, the ramps cut into the curbs in sidewalks, the scissors that can be used by both right- and left-handed people. Once you are aware of universal design principles (for more information, visit the Center for Universal Design Web site, it will affect your decisions—how you arrange the chairs within a reading space or how students check out materials. For instance, simply moving your read-aloud chair from in front of a window to across from it can make a big difference to hearing-impaired students who are trying to read your lips. That’s because it sheds more light on your face, and reduces the glare for students facing you. (See “Access Granted,” p. 48, for other room design tips.) The Center for Applied Special Technology’s Universal Design for Learning (UDL) goes one step further in applying universal design to lesson planning. Visit their “Teaching Every Student” Web page to access their free online tools, lesson plans, and tutorials to make your library curriculum more user-friendly to students with disabilities. You can also plug one of your existing lessons into the Curriculum Barriers Finder Tool to detect potential accessibility problems. A Solutions Finder Tool will then provide ideas to help you eliminate those roadblocks. These same techniques are a boost for other students, as well, including English language learners, those with emotional or behavioral problems, or different learning styles because they allow all learners various ways of acquiring information and demonstrating what they know. For instance, using graphic organizers taps into many more learning styles than the usual fill-in-the-blank worksheets.

Expanding Access

Next, take the time to reexamine your existing technology. For example, using closed captioning on the televisions in your building not only helps hearing-impaired students, but also those hearing students who learn best visually. Also, many software programs have built-in accessibility features. Microsoft Windows has some basic accessibility options in its control panel. For visual impairments, you can play with the contrast, scroll bar, and icon size, the width and speed of the cursor, and turn on a magnifier that enlarges a portion of the screen where the cursor is placed. There is even rudimentary voice recognition and a text-to-speech screen reader. For hearing impairments, SoundSentry provides a visual alert when the computer makes a sound, and ShowSounds displays captions for the speech and sound elements of various programs. Both can simply be switched on. Windows also offers a variety of keyboard options. FilterKeys ensures that only one character is typed, no matter how long a student with slow physical abilities presses on a key. And StickyKeys allows a user to press one key at a time when using Shift, Alt, or Ctrl functions. In addition to benefiting students with disabilities, activating these options on a few computers in the library might also aid others, who are easily distracted, weak readers, or poor typists. For Mac users, OS X has similar options. The Web, too, can be made more accessible to students with special needs. Even if all students can access pages in the conventional way, those with impaired vision, for example, may require screen readers or other technology to help them see the site. So make sure your Web content is accessible to them. If you are starting from scratch, the Web Accessibility Initiative has all sorts of tips and guides. You can test the accessibility of existing Web pages by plugging them in to WebXACT. For some students, these basic changes will be enough. Others will need more specialized adaptive technology—sophisticated, high-tech strategies, technologies, and devices that allow individuals with special needs to work around their areas of challenge. These include alternative keyboards, such as IntelliKeys, input devices, including touch screens and joysticks; OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanners and speech synthesizers, such as Kurzweil 3000; and high-powered magnifiers like ZoomText. If you know that your students require such tools, contact adaptive technology experts for advice, starting with your special education teachers. The Alliance for Technology Access has a list of state contacts for assistive technology resources, as does RESNA, the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America. Your state may also have a specific resource for assistive technology for children. Often times, specialized equipment can be rented, shared, or borrowed, and tested before a costly purchase is made. Whether the students you work with need specialized adaptive technology or simply a new seating arrangement, your actions—or inactions—can have a big impact on how those children function in your library. There’s a lot of talk in education about providing for students’ individual needs and teaching to a variety of learning styles. Students with disabilities are just another point in the spectrum in trying to meet students’ individual needs. By starting with some simple changes, you can assure that every child in your library feels welcomed.

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Author Information

Rebecca Hogue Wojahn is the education reference librarian at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.