Accessible Web Application for Students with Disabilities at UC San Diego

The Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) at UC San Diego requested process improvement in the way that students receive accommodations for classes. As part of a three-person development team, we took a manual, paper process into a digital workflow, including a web app with special affordances for accessibility and mobile.

The Task permalink

Beforehand, OSD students who requested and received accommodations for classes we granted an Authorization for Accommodations (AFA) letter. As a manual process, they were required to go to the OSD office and pick up multiple couples of the AFA and hand deliver it to each of their instructors - sometimes before the first meeting of the class, requiring setting up a separate meeting with the instructor.

Further, this was done on a quarterly basis. If a student took 4 classes each quarter, they would have to deliver twelve letters each academic year to different instructors.

With the obvious challenge this posed to students with physical impairments, but also the considerable time investment and potential scheduling conflicts, we looked to create a solution that would solve the issue of students hand delivering the AFA letters.

The Challenges permalink

At first glance, the primary problem facing the team seemed simple: How could we allow OSD students to obtain and deliver the AFA letters in a digital format? However, this raised a host of related issues; technical, procedural, and political in nature.

Namely, we could not require students to use the system, although the application would be accessible. We had to provision that students could continue using the old procedure, thus folding in a procedural backwards compatibility.

As with any institution implementing a large scale, new solution, there would have to be buy in from the users and additional checks that were not present in the manual process.

The Solutions permalink

We developed a responsive web app that was as fully WCAG 2.1 AAA compliant in as many areas possible (fully AA compliant).

OSD students can log in with campus credentials and view their classes and accommodations. From the application, they can accept the accommodations and send an AFA letter to the class instructor via email. The student also receives a copy of the same letter.

If a student is not comfortable with the system, he/she can always opt to use the paper system that was in place.