I would grateful for any and all information about the extent to which various colleges and universities incorporate audiobooks as part of their services for students with dyslexia. Do students typically need to have their own membership in RFB&D or do some colleges make their institutional memberships available to qualified students? As students without reading disabilities must purchase their own books and the texts are for individual use outside of the classroom, my hunch is that institutions are NOT obligated by law to provide the same texts in alternative format for students with disabilities. On the other hand, I can imagine that providing access to books on tape for research purposes would help to level the playing field for students who cannot make adequate use of the college library or inter-library loan services. What has your experience been? Thanks so much.
Re: Information needed re: books on tape as accommodation
OUr college will provide them — our disabilities folks are pretty eager to have studetns succeed. (It’s not utterly altrusitic — there’s a real movement to get “high risk” students to actually succeed in classes so that they can pay for more of them — but that just means that it’s easier for us to actually try to be helpful :))
However, it takes advance planning. ONe big issue wiht college LD issues is that we *can’t* act without the student asking for it so often when they do, it’s too late.
Our experience at our son’s college has been - the college makes NO effort to supply him with alternative texts. Nor does it have any alternative texts. His IEP says ‘books on tape” and the college interprets that to mean - he can have them if he can find them.
Nor does the college make any membership they might have in RFB&D available to students.
My son’s college is not interested in leveling the playing field. It’s only interested in not being sued for violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. and in seeming to be compliant with the federal law that is. It goes only as far as it must go to avoid censure and no farther.