In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities quickly transitioned from in-person

instruction to online learning, inadvertently overlooking the needs of students with disabilities and
"placing them on the backburner 'en masse.'" While eductors have been transferring two months' worth
of lesson plans to digital format, disabled students have been left without adequate digital accessibility
to succeed in the unprecedented and current remote learning environment.

Learning accommodations such as note-takers, teaching assistants and helpful classmates are used by
many students with disabilities to help navigate the classroom or "enhance accessibility through an
environmental or communicative change." "Access needs," on the other hand, are tools and resources
necessary to engage with the world, such as requiring Braille because of blindness or poor vision.
Experts believe that "...institutions can and should 'do better' by making investments in software that
continuously provides alternative, accessible material formats for students with any disabilities."
Unfortunately so far, that has not been the case, with the "pandemic forcing institutions 'to confront
who is expendable.'"

Blind students and those with impaired vision have reached out to The National Federation of the Blind
amid the shift to online learning, relaying their discontent with incompatible learning materials for
screen readers, which read and navigate documents and sometimes transcribe them into Braille.
Students who were once able to listen to readings and follow along during in-person instruction are now
unable to use digital textbooks, which are not compatible with screen readers. Since professors rely on
such digital textbooks, blind and visually-impaired students feel as though they are falling behind on
their coursework.

Dyslexic students, autistic students, and those with learning disabilities also encounter issues with their
screen readers when they process documents that are images instead of text. For students who have
physical disabilities, navigating images becomes troublesome if they are accustomed to only using
computer keyboards, not mouses.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing students may not have access to American Sign Language interpreters or real-
time captioning for online learning. Real-time captioning contains "transcriptions of speech produced by
a person, not computer-generated," and are what students most likely had access to during in-person
instruction. Computer-generated captioning, on the other hand, is "subpar" to real-time captioning; as
of now, it is the feature provided in Zoom, WebEx and Google Hangout platforms, currently and
popularly used for remote learning. According to experts, whatever resources are provided in the
classroom - in this case, real-time captioning - should be available for remote learning.
Today's students with disabilities, like all other high school and college students, are adjusting to a
different world - having unprecedented experiences in an unprecedented time. Scholarships.com
continues to offer scholarships for students with disabilities during this difficult time so that they may be
financially equipped to pay for college once things return back to normal.