Roles & Responsibilities

Role of the post-secondary institution

The legal duty to accommodate rests with the institution, not any single individual or department.

To meet their duty to accommodate, institutions have the following responsibilities:

• Ensure that the school environment is welcoming and all students treat one another with respect.
• Take immediate remedial action in response to incidents of bullying and harassment.
• Educate all faculty, staff and students about disability-related issues.
• Review the accessibility of the whole institution.
• Include the needs of disabled students when creating or revising services, policies, processes, courses, programs or curricula, or physical spaces.

Role of the student

Post-secondary students are expected to be active partners in the disability accommodation process. This includes making their request for accommodations known by registering with the institution’s disability services office and providing them with disability documentation. They are also expected to communicate their accommodation needs to their accessibility counsellor (or consultant or advisor – different institutions use different titles) and work with them to determine possible accommodations, including sharing what accommodations have been helpful in the past.

It is important for disabled students to know that accommodations in post-secondary are in place to provide them with equitable access to their courses – they do not guarantee outcomes. They still have to meet the course learning outcomes and essential requirements in order to pass their courses.

Although these responsibilities and expectations for the students may seem minimal, and the faculty expectations may seem daunting in contrast, it is important to understand that the process for academic accommodations is not easy for students. In fact, it has been estimated that 100,000 to 200,000 students in Canada need accommodations, but have never sought or received them. The possible reasons for this are varied, including the inability to receive the medical documentation necessary to secure the accommodations. Students may not have access to a doctor who is able or willing to sign off on the medical documentation, and many students do not have doctors who will support the needs of students with mental health diagnoses. Furthermore, a psychoeducational assessment to diagnose learning disabilities, ADHD, or autism as an adult can cost an average of $3500.

Additionally, students who had accommodations in elementary and high school often were not included in the conversations about their accommodations and they likely did not learn to advocate for their accommodation needs. Students may not be aware of how to access accommodations, may fear disclosing to the disability services office, and often fear that their accommodations will not remain confidential once they try to move on to the workplace after graduation. On top of the stigma of disabilities, these barriers mean that for a student to have a letter of accommodation and then to approach their faculty to put the accommodation in place is not a simple process.

Role of disability support offices

The accessibility counsellors, also sometimes called consultants or advisors, work with individual students with disabilities to link the student’s functional impairments to appropriate academic accommodations, to co-design with the student an individualised accommodation plan, and communicate the plan (or help the student to communicate) to the student’s faculty. The work of accessibility services is guided by the three accommodation principles described above.

Role of faculty

Faculty are key partners in the accommodation of disabled post-secondary students. They too are guided by the three principles described above. Their role includes maintaining the students’ right to confidentiality, accepting the student is acting in good faith, and implementing accommodations, as needed. Faculty should contact the student’s accessibility counsellor if they have questions, concerns or feel one or more accommodations would result in an undue hardship. It is not their role to deny accommodations that they have concerns about.

To promote the principle of integration and full participation, faculty should make sure that their classroom is welcoming and that all students treat one another with respect, they include disabled students in all class activities, and they take immediate action if any bullying or harassment occurs in the learning environment.

Role of post-secondary staff

Post-secondary staff, while not usually required to implement accommodations, still have a responsibility to support disabled post-secondary students. Staff should be aware of the disability services office at their institution, and should be able to refer students there when appropriate. For more information on how and when to refer, see the infosheet connected to this toolkit.