Resources for Faculty and Campus
Materials for Teaching and Holding Inclusive Events
A note on the timing of students' Faculty Notification Letters: Please be aware that students may request accommodations at any point in the semester or any time as a student at UW-Eau Claire. They are not required to request accommodations at the beginning of the semester or year or to send you a notification at that time; they may do so at any point it is deemed reasonable and appropriate. Accommodations are not retroactive.
Spring 2023 syllabus statement paragraph, for reference
Syllabus statement
The office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) requests that instructors include the following statement in their syllabus and announce it at the first meeting of the class. This approach protects student confidentiality and promotes inclusion of students with approved accommodations.
Note to Students with Disabilities:
Any student who has a documented disability and is approved for academic accommodations should remind their instructors that they have a Faculty Notification Letter from the office of Services for Students with Disabilities. Students may schedule an individual appointment with the instructor to review the accommodations. To maintain your confidentiality, please do not approach the instructor before or after class to discuss your accommodation needs. For additional information, please contact the Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) office at 715-836-5800 or at Centennial Hall 2106 or visit the SSD webpage.
Accessing Faculty Notification Letters and using the Test Center
Features of the Faculty Portal
- You can view all your students’ accommodations in one place (Faculty Notification Letters).
- If you are using the Testing Center for exams, you need only fill out exam parameters once per section, and this is editable should your exam requirements change over the course of the semester. This is called the Testing Agreement.
- You can see a list of all students’ exam requests, from initial request to completed exams, and whether they are approved, in the Faculty Portal.
- You can upload exams to the Portal and receive scanned completed exams as well.
OCRing a text for use by screen readers and other assistive technology
If you have PDFs of documents you're using for assignments and none of the text is selectable, you can make these accessible to more of your students by using OCR (optical character recognition) technology so that they are machine readable. Faculty have access to Adobe Pro through Creative Cloud. This is the recommended application for OCRing PDFs. Here is a quick guide (from Adobe.com):
- Open a PDF file containing a scanned image in Acrobat for Mac or PC.
- Click on the “Edit PDF” tool in the right pane. Acrobat automatically applies optical character recognition (OCR) to your document and converts it to a fully editable copy of your PDF.
- Click the text element you wish to edit and start typing. New text matches the look of the original fonts in your scanned image.
- Choose “File” > “Save As” and type a new name for your editable document.
OCRing a PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro (Video)
Please also reach out to our office if you need assistance with this, or with if you would like assistance with other ways to make your courses more accessible.