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<p>Personally, I don’t think it should be something extraordinary that a deaf student can get some sort of accommodation within class for their disability.</p>
<p>And I don’t think it’s too much to ask for gluten free food. When I did a summer program at a university, the cafeteria was able to provide special meals for the student. It wasn’t even a high-end university, just your average state school with Sodexo.</p>
<p>A lot of the responses to this question have a great deal of emotion wrapped up in them. That’s understandable, but it’s not a fair, consistent or rational way to handle disabled student accommodations. The process is run through the Disabled Student Services Office rather than through individual professors, who inevitably will have varying degrees of awareness of ADA accommodations. The student either presents documentation of their disability or arranges through the office to have an assessment done. Then a campus committee meets to propose appropriate accommodations and informs and works with the instructor to implement them. There is always an appeal route available to the student.</p>
<p>Accommodations for deaf students are perhaps the most complex ones to make. Out of ten students who can accurately be termed “deaf,” you may have ten different situations and needs for accommodations, based upon the degrees of hearing loss, ability to use various kinds of technological aids, ability to utilize ASL or other interpreting, etc. Of course, if a student with a disability asks a professor for a favor and the prof grants it, the situation may not need to involve the Disability Office. But in that case, you can have students getting all kinds of adaptations of delivery methods in a course without any documentation of the nature of their disability, discussion about the best means of moderating the need, or consistency in accommodations between qualified students.</p>
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<p>A big state university and a big food service contractor have probably seen “gluten free” requests often enough that they likely has it built into their systems.</p>
<p>I guess being with Sodexo had a lot to do with it. But I’d still be surprised if any school couldn’t handle gluten-free requests.</p>
<p>On further thought, another time when I was at a college program, the food in the cafeteria there was not suitable for any person, gluten-free or not. Yuck. I could not imagine having to go there for a year and be forced to eat out of that cafeteria.</p>
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<p>It doesn’t have to be something extraordinary but a simple email to a professor explaining the situation and asking how it would be handled would be reasonable before you sign up for the class. Same thing with the available of gluten free foods, sure, a school may say that they have gluten free foods but it might be very limited and do you really want to eat the same thing every meal for a year? If you have special needs of some sort, it would be reasonable to investigate exactly what the school has in place to accommodate those needs. We have a friend who’s DD has some health issues and really needed to live in a single room (no roommate). A couple colleges they looked into were not equipped to handle that, no single rooms in freshman dorms. They were willing to accommodate her by letting her live in sophomore housing. Yes, it’s reasonable, but she wanted to live in freshmen housing so she passed on those schools that didn’t have that option for her.</p>
<p>gadad, what school are you talking about, do you know what school the deaf girl in the OP attended? That was certainly not the procedure at either of the two colleges I’ve attended. There’s never been any commitee, and in both cases one man at the disabilities office reviewed my documentation, wrote up a paper with some suggestions for accommodations, and then I had to negotiate everything with the professors myself-- the professors decided what accommodations they would offer regardless of what it said in the paperwork from the disabilities office, as those were merely “suggestions” – I was refused some accommodations outlined on the sheet, and some of the accommodations I received weren’t on the sheet, and that was how the disabilities office expected their “suggestions” to be taken. There was NOT any way to appeal these decisions and the professors were not held accountable if they refused to participate in these discussions with me or the disabilities office or if they refused to accommodate. There is absolutely not any kind of standardized procedure nationwide for determining disability accommodations.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, the girl in the OP attended Mount Holyoke College, and she said she had a situation that was generally the same as Emaheevul07’s above.</p>
<p>There are lots of accommodations that are very intrusive for everyone else – the sign language interpreters that stand up at certain theatrical performances would be a good example of that. </p>
<p>If this were not a film class, then I’d think that subtitles displayed for the whole class would be a reasonable accommodation. But as a film class, the objective would be to see the film as the director issued it, which did not include subtitles. Allowing the student to separately watch the film (perhaps on a laptop) with subtitles would seem to have been a very reasonable approach. </p>
<p>I like subtitles. I use them a lot, but there is no question that they are intrusive, often block something else you’d like to see, and definitely distract from the cinematography. </p>
<p>They provided accommodations allowed the student to benefit from the class. There’s nothing in the law that says that the rest of the class needs to also suffer through those same accommodations.</p>