Last updated on November 26, 2023
College and university disability offices often ask me to address the issue of assignment deadlines and test accommodations for autistic students and those with other “invisible” disabilities.
Professors and instructors often decline to offer deadline extensions and test accommodations, arguing that such adjustments unfairly benefit students with special needs. If the professor knows some of the legal cases, he or she will declare that the nature of the course requires strict adherence to deadlines.
These debates seem subjective, but they are not. The decided legal cases suggest that the “nature of a course” argument only applies if the assignments and tests are intended to reflect working conditions. For example, a timed test for a healthcare professional makes sense if the test relates to saving lives under pressure. A timed test for completing healthcare paperwork? Probably discriminatory because medical billing is not time sensitive to the minute.
In writing courses, I argue that deadlines should be extended when a request is reasonable. I also argue against timed tests, generally.
A journalism professor could require that stories about an event be submitted in a timely manner, reflecting the workplace for reporters. But most writing courses aren’t trying to recreate newsroom pressures. Even most professional writers and editors can work when and how they want professionally to meet deadlines.
As a professor, I hypothetically would not extend deadlines or end timed tests in laboratory settings for any medical student, when speed matters to saving lives.
Every language impairment, challenge, or disability (whatever the student wishes to call it) differs. We all know this, but stating so is the first step in starting a dialogue with the student and/or his support providers (university disability services and legal affairs offices).
The students I have worked with requested and received accommodations including:
- Text readers (scan-to-screen) that enlarged the pages or even scanned the text to PDF for reading on computing devices.
- Text-to-speech readers, which are again scanners that then convert scanned text to speech (Kurzweil, Nuance).
- Adaptive input devices, including dictation, eye-tracking, breath input, pictrograph keyboards, and so on.
- Waivers to take courses online as independent study, or as face-to-face IS as needed.
- Waivers from group work (most often with autism, social anxiety, some ADHD — but also after some horrible bullying of non-verbal students who simply were excluded by the speed of group discussions.)
- TSS (Therapeutic Support Specialists) who accompanied the student to classes and group sessions.
Reading, I enlarge the text on screen, use glasses, and find other ways to distinguish words. Ideally, any software for reading allows me to change typefaces and font point sizes so I can read in a font that works at that moment. My wife reads a book a night; I read a book a month if I’m lucky. Text-to-speech and audio books are ideal for me since I read approximately six pages an hour when the materials are dense. I read faster (skim) on screen, which helps with time limits but also increases errors.
I use dictation software often because I have multiple disabilities that reduce my writing and reading speed, as well as complicating the encode/decode processes. The dictation errors, unfortunately, were more common in the past and instructors assumed I had problems with issues that were symptoms of technology.
When I teach, I tell students that I cannot read faces well, do not recognize vocal tone changes, and am literal unless I interpret an idiom or figurative move through memorization. I spent an entire summer working through the Scholastic Dictionary of Idioms to learn common phrases and I still am confused by new metaphors or unfamiliar sayings. I admit, I’ll seem “aloof” or “rude” because social routines are memorized and poorly executed at times. Sensory processing issues can also cause problems, such as buzzing lights, and I won’t be able to focus as well when there are such inputs overwhelming me.
Only 15 to 17 percent of “high functioning” autistic and neurologically atypical adults are employed full-time (“Fewer than one in six autistic adults are in full-time employment Under 16% of survey participants have full-time paid work. This figure has hardly changed since 2007, when a previous National Autistic Society survey put the figure at 15%” NAS 2016.) Unfortunately, 77 percent of autistics have the cognitive capacity and desire to work, at least part-time, so there’s a huge gap that other disabled communities have addressed with more success.
Writing classes, particularly first-year composition, act as a gatekeeper in higher education. FYC breaks many of the STEM students I worked with over the last decade, including several savants. These students quit college because of a single requirement: writing courses. Nothing hurts more than being told you are a “stupid genius” because you don’t meet social expectations or preconceptions of how “good” people are able to naturally express (or fake) empathy and understanding of things like microexpressions and vocal tone. Group work, especially peer review or peer editing, can exacerbate the social challenges of the atypical student.
This is merely one perspective from a writer who was constantly told I would fail. My wife is the lead of technical communications for her engineering firm. She works from home, online, and leads the department via email and text messages. We need to start considering that maybe our classes in writing don’t always align with workplace experiences. I know at least a half-dozen technical writers who work from home, alone, and have primary degrees in STEM fields. I know of one Democratic political speech writer who also does not leave home or interact with people directly.
Question our assumptions about writing and the teaching of writing.