Introduction to Accessibility and Accommodations

The Accessibility & Accommodations Toolkit is a guide for everyone in the campus community outside of accessibility services to learn how best to support post-secondary students with disabilities. This includes faculty, administrative staff, student leaders, student services, counselling services, and health services, among others. The aim of the toolkit is to provide the campus community with a fulsome understanding of disability, accommodations, and accessibility, in order for them to provide support and referrals to students when necessary, and to design their programming in the most accessible way possible.

This toolkit is the result of collaboration between the Centre for Innovation in Campus Mental Health and eight disability services professionals from Ontario colleges and universities. It is important to note that this toolkit was not developed by students with lived experience of disability. However, as it is a living toolkit, the Centre welcomes the feedback of that community. If you are a student with lived experience of disability and would like to provide feedback on the toolkit, please contact mpadjen@campusmentalhealth.ca.

This toolkit uses both identity-first and person-first language interchangeably throughout the documents to illustrate that both of these approaches to disability-inclusive language are valid and acceptable. While many reading this toolkit may have been taught that person-first language is the appropriate language to use, many people in the disabled community prefer to use identity-first language, similarly to how race or sexuality might be expressed: i.e. “a Black woman”, “a bisexual man”, “a Deaf person”. For more information on language use, see the Language section of the toolkit.