The Office of Accessible Education (OAE) is the primary contact for students with disabilities to receive the accommodations they need to gain equal access to their educations. It is also a source of campus jobs for hundreds of students each year.

About 100 students each quarter volunteer as notetakers for classes they are taking, uploading their notes to a Box folder after each class to fulfill an academic accommodation for a classmate. Other students hold paid positions as lab assistants, exam scribes and visual descriptionists.

“Accommodations are highly individualized, so there are other jobs that come up,” said Shelley Hou, Director of Technology for OAE. One example: an archeology assistant who could be present at a field site. Students have also worked as film assistants, carrying or setting up equipment on location for students with mobility or dexterity-related issues.

Making equations accessible

Kimmy Chang, Class of ’22, works as a LaTeX typesetter, converting the professor’s handwritten notes for math and computer science classes into LaTeX, a formatting language that makes equations accessible to students with visual impairments. She already used LaTeX for a lot of her classes so didn’t have to learn it separately, though she has had to modify her typesetting slightly.

“I was using bullet points in the notes, but when this gets converted into Braille, it converts into a dot and means something completely different,” Chang said.

Visual descriptionists meet with students outside of class, describing lecture slides and any other visual material from the class to students who cannot see them.

Describing visuals

Srećko Ćurković, a master’s degree student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has worked as a visual descriptionist for computer science classes. Visual descriptionists need to have taken the course or an equivalent one.

“It makes a huge difference for the students if their visual descriptionist is familiar with the material,” Ćurković said. “I’m not expected to work as a tutor, but sometimes there were parts of the lecture that the instructor wouldn’t explain in detail because it was visual, so I had to explain it.”

Notetakers are students currently enrolled in the class, and they are paid a stipend at the end of the quarter for uploading their notes.

“I’m already taking the notes,” said Emily Schultz, Class of ’22, who has been a notetaker for the past year, primarily for chemistry and physics classes. “I try to format them similarly to how the professor breaks down the notes for class.”

Transcribing discussions

Taking notes on a discussion, where a lot of students are answering open-ended questions, presents a different challenge from taking notes on a lecture.

“I’m incorporating not only the teacher’s comments but also the students’ comments on the questions,” said Anna Lee, Class of ’22, who is a notetaker for a political science class. There also tends to be less written on the board. “I try to differentiate between the students’ responses.”

These are paid jobs, but the students who do them also get satisfaction from helping other students.

“I think the people who are partaking in this are people who just really want to help out,” Lee said. She became interested in notetaking because she has a family member with a disability. “I understand that it’s not easy for him to listen to a lecture and immediately understand it. Notetaking is a burden to him. Every time I’m sitting in a lecture and am helping someone out, that’s super rewarding.”