Accommodations are teacher practices in presenting information, alternatives for student responses, changes in scheduling, settings, and timing of learning activities that enable students with disabilities to access the content of a class, written materials, and facilities. Accommodations are intended to reduce or even eliminate the barriers to learning that a student’s disability may cause.

Accommodations are not intended to reduce learning expectations or give students an advantage over non-disabled students. Typically, student’s who need accommodations will need them during instruction and possibly during assessment.

Any accommodations provided to a student during assessment must also have been provided, on a regular basis, during classroom instruction. It’s important to note that although some accommodations may be appropriate for instructional use, they may not be appropriate for use on a standardized assessment. There may be consequences (e.g., invalidating a student’s test score) for the use of some accommodations during standardized assessments such as the Graduate Record Exam, or the Law School Admissions Test. Typically, accommodation use does not begin and end in school. Students who use accommodations will generally also need them at home, in the community, and as they get older, in postsecondary education and at work.

Accommodations are generally grouped as follows:

Presentation Accommodations—Allow students to access information in ways that do not require them to visually read standard print. These alternate modes of access are auditory, multi-sensory, tactile, and visual. (e.g. repeat directions, read aloud)