Correction and clarification appended.

Rabbi Elyse Winick ’86 led a roundtable discussion last Thursday entitled “Campus Life: Accessibility for People with Access and Functional Needs,” examining the state of accessibility on campus for students with various disabilities. The talk included a discussion of two new positions that were created this year to help students who have disabilities.

Beth Rodgers-Kay, the director of Disabilities Services and Support, outlined the new positions during the course of the roundtable: a Web Accessibility Specialist in the Office of Communications and an Information Design Accessibility Specialist within Library and Technology Services.

Rodgers-Kay explained that the Web Accessibility Specialist — Sarah Ferguson — focuses on “looking at the University’s public-facing web presence and [questions if] that presence [is] accessible.”

She added in a follow up email to the Justice that Ferguson’s duties “are to educate and lead the university in accessibility of the university’s web-based content presence and to train faculty and staff on how to make web-based content accessible. With her technical leadership, she has a focus on promoting, assessing, and maintaining web accessibility, beginning with the university's public-facing web presence.”

Meanwhile, the Information Design Accessibility Specialist — currently an unfilled position — was designed to be “positioned deeper in the structure of Brandeis’s IT, and the position is kind of somebody who knows about coding and … when we’ve got a product, this person can see if there’s an obstacle to accessibility [and address the issue],” Rodgers-Kay said at the event.

Winick began the roundtable explaining her personal connection to the topic, sharing that she was shocked by the insights she learned from leading Taglit Birthright trips to Israel designed for people with autism.

She also spoke about the lengths she went to in order to accommodate a blind student on a different Birthright trip and how it affected the rest of the participants.

“I found myself making everyone close their eyes and feel the vastness of the space as we stood on the edge of a valley … and what happened as a result was that everyone else in the group was at least as transformed as the student whose needs we were trying to meet,” Winick recalled.

“That’s something to take into account as well. … I’d like to suggest that we’re so accustomed to framing the world in particular ways that when we shift the framing to accommodate those who experience the world differently, we’re also the beneficiaries,” Winick added.

During the course of the roundtable, Kerry Patenaude, the assistant director of Disabilites Services and Support, stressed the “invisible disabilities,” like sensory disabilities or learning disabilities, that often get overlooked for the more obvious ones, like wheelchairs. Haley Muth ’16, the president of the Brandeis American Sign Language Club, observed that more often than not, deaf people do not consider themselves disabled and that miscommunication leads to the deaf community becoming isolated, which can be negated by a welcoming and engaging attitude.

Patenaude also stressed the importance of screen readers, which help the visually-impaired interpret slides and readings during class, and pointed out the need for “universal design,” which is an approach to building products and designing courses in which all abled and disabled communities can use the product or access the information available.

An LTS staffer pointed out a number of problems with accessibility in the library, particularly that database vendors are not required to make their products compatible with screen readers, meaning visually-impaired students cannot access information available on databases the University pays for.

While the panel agreed that this was not an issue which the University could tackle unilaterally, several speakers proposed that the University lead a coalition of Boston-based colleges and universities in demanding better access to such technology from database vendors.

Specific to Brandeis, this staffer noted that library aisles are not wide enough for wheelchair access and that elevators that are wheelchair-accessible are not clearly marked.

As the discussion opened up to attendees, Jade Lera ’17 spoke about her experiences eating on campus, stating that, as a blind student, she often struggles with dining options on campus.

“Most of the time, I only go to the dining halls if I have someone to go with, but I don’t want to feel like I have to do that,” she said. “I want to go to dinner just for the company.” Rodgers-Kay pointed out that while the accessibility of dining halls needs to be fixed, some places like Louis’ Deli offer students the opportunity to order ahead of time online, which can ease issues surrounding reading the menu or interacting with staff members.

In her email to the Justice, Rodgers-Kay noted that Disability Services has been working with Sodexo to improve accessibility in the dining halls.

“For example, a student who is blind can use a screen reader such as Mac VoiceOver to discover menus being offered and decide ahead of time what he or she might like to eat. When the student enters the dining area, knowing precisely what he or she wants — it is so much easier to locate that menu item. Additionally, when the floor plan or layout of the dining area, food stations or Hoot Store are kept consistent, students can learn and find what they're looking for with greater ease,” she wrote.

Rodgers-Kay ended the roundtable by pointing out that the University has consistently helped students with disabilities in the past.

Additionally, she mentioned that the Office of Disabilities Services for Undergraduates works with the Registrar in order to change the locations of classes for students who have mobility issues. “I think when I compare what is happening on this campus to what I know is happening on some other campuses, Brandeis is actually dong a pretty good job,” Rodgers-Kay said.

—Max Moran contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Beth Rodgers-Kay spoke about library databases, aisles and elevators. An LTS staffer spoke on these issues. 

An earlier version of this article falsely implied that Disability Services staff members only change classrooms of students with mobility issues on specific occasions. This is a standard practice for Disability Services.