Handicapped accessible?

E-mails aren't really a problem. Neither is getting to and from class, thanks to Carley, her "compact" black labrador and the generosity of several students. It's the less obvious things — the difficulty of accessing Internet resources, getting reading materials for courses she switches into late and walking through snow in the winter — that impede Sarah Swords '03 from leading a regular life at Princeton.

Swords is one of a handful of students on campus with a physical disability.

"Being blind at Princeton means that you have to be able to ask for things and keep asking and keep asking," she explained.

Like athletes scouting the best coaching and sports facilities before applying to colleges, high schools students who have physical disabilities apply to schools based on the accessibility of those institutions, according to officials from across the Ivy League.

All schools face the same pressures, but with its few disabled students on campus and slim resources, Princeton may be a few steps behind. And while the University cannot control problems such as inclement weather, some claim it should provide more services to accommodate students with physical disabilities — improvements that could attract students who currently are opting for Ivies with more comprehensive services.

Before deciding to come to Princeton, Swords faced a choice of campus environments — between being coddled or living independently. Her choices — Princeton, Harvard and Emory — could not have been more different.

"It could have been very easy to go to Emory," she said, explaining that most of her family is from the Atlanta area. "And Harvard has a fabulous program for disabilities — they lay the world at your feet."

Harvard was so accommodating and had so much experience that the head of the disability services offered to meet Swords in a coffee shop, rather than have the student attempt to find her office building in the middle of campus.

Comparatively, Princeton was a gamble. It had the best history department, but after meeting with administrators, Swords had the impression that she would be on her own.

"At Harvard they have done it before, they know what they are doing and they will help you within a strict limit," she said. "Here, they haven't done it before, don't know and will not be able to foresee what you will need — but if there is anything you need they will try to do it."

For Swords, being a pioneer seemed appealing, but for many students with disabilities, the other option is clearly more favorable.

"A few years ago, we lost a deaf swimmer to Harvard for all sorts of reasons," said Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Students Sandy Silverman, who oversees all the accommodations for undergraduate disabled students.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

"They had on hand two full-time sign language interpreters who could follow her all day and to swim practice, and we just didn't have that resource."

Unlike its Ivy League counterparts — all of which have a separate office for disabilities services — Princeton's services for disabled students falls under the auspices of the dean of undergraduate students. When a disabled student matriculates at the University, he or she must register with the office, where — on an individual basis — the deans and the student determine what Princeton can do to suit the student's needs, Silverman said.

Accommodations vary according to the student's disability and personal preferences, but generally follow the same lines — moving room assignments to more accessible buildings and retrofitting housing for mobility-impaired students, using voice-recognition software and scanning course readers into Braille for those who are visually-impaired and providing court stenographers to take simultaneous notes during lectures and precepts for students with hearing disabilities.

"We take a fairly individualized approach to how we accommodate students since some blind students read Braille and others don't, and some deaf students sign and others don't," Silverman said. "You can't decide for someone else how they should communicate or get information based on a standard that may not apply to them."

Seven percent of undergraduates register as permanently disabled — a small percentage, according to the dean. In fact, no student who uses a wheelchair has attended the University since 1996.

Why so few? In describing the problems Yale has historically faced in attracting hearing-disabled students in particular, the director of Yale's office for equal opportunity, Francis Holloway, explained that getting disabled students to come to a college resembles a chicken-and-egg conundrum.

"Look, people are going to talk to other people. If someone is qualified to attend Yale, Harvard or Princeton, they are going to find and talk to students who are there or who graduated, and find out what the services are like," she said, adding that if a school does not have a history of accommodating students, it will have a difficult time attracting others in the future.

For example, Swords chose Princeton on the advice of a blind student who graduated from the University in 1998 and who had plenty of suggestions on how to sidestep the administration's periodic inefficiency.

"If I had not met her, I would have not come to this school," she said.

While the accommodations have improved from just a decade ago, renovating Princeton's campus to make it completely accessible to students and faculty with disabilities is still one of the University's concerns, Silverman said. But it is also a gradual process.

"When I first arrived in 1990, it was impossible for students who used wheelchairs to take classes in McCosh 50. Now there's an elevator, and it's not an issue anyone discusses anymore," she said in an e-mail. But, she pointed out, Mathey dining hall and most of the eating clubs are still not wheelchair-accessible at all.

To adapt housing for students who used wheelchairs, the University equipped rooms in Forbes with garage door openers and wider doorframes and with larger, more accessible showers. But even these were not the most convenient accommodations.

"At that time Forbes was the most accessible place for wheelchairs, but it was hard because the last two students using wheelchairs were politics and Wilson School majors. They had to cross not only Alexander but also Washington Road to get to their departments," she said. "And that was obviously difficult."

And distances across campus in general can be a problem for students going from class to class, with just 10 minutes in between. To alleviate the burden for mobility-impaired students, Silverman's office works with students to schedule classes with plenty of time for traveling.

The other Ivies share common challenges in this area with the University, and they have also implemented many of the same solutions. Brown, Columbia, Yale and Harvard — like Princeton — provide student readers and Braille scanning of course packets for blind students. Yale offers hearing-impaired students court stenographers, just as Princeton does.

"One issue that Princeton and Yale and most other Ivies have is cold weather," Harvard's Assistant Provost Sarah Wald said. "When things begin to ice up, we make a special effort to accommodate students with physical disabilities."

As a result, most Ivies provide shuttle van services for students to get across campus. Some, such as Harvard, offer close to 24-hour service, and others, like Brown, are trying to lengthen their schedules.

The most striking difference between Princeton and other Ivy League schools is the clear structure of the programs available at other colleges. Harvard, Brown, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Penn and Dartmouth each have an independently staffed administrative office dedicated to serving undergraduates with physical disabilities.

Because of its multi-house system, Harvard has several administrators in charge of handling disability services for different segments of its campus population, in addition to its fully staffed Student Disabilities Resources Center for undergraduates. The center provides full-time sign language interpreters, mobility orientation sessions, counseling and mock interviews, in addition to other services that are also available at Princeton, according to SDR Director Louise Russell and the center's Website.

Harvard is currently attempting to broaden its Adaptive Technology Laboratory — which provides Braille, enlarged print, voice output and recognition technology, large print monitors and voice recognition software, as well as training and assistance on how to use the software.

"We are being responsive to what I think is an emerging issue for all colleges that involves Web-accessibility to make sure that all the Websites and technology needed by students [are accessible to those] with disabilities," Wald said.

Another approach taken by Brown was to add disabilities to the spectrum of diversity issues discussed on campus, according to Dean of Disabilities Support Services Elyse Chaplin. With more than 20 physically disabled undergraduates, Brown's DSS office is striving to increase "awareness of students with disabilities on campus" through activities such as Disability Awareness Day in the spring.

Dartmouth created the "Barrier Removal" program to specifically address the mobility and accessibility concerns of the school's 50 students with physical disabilities, two of whom use wheelchairs.

"This almost always involves physical barrier removal, mostly increasing physical accessibility and adding sound enhancement to places people congregate — auditoriums, places of entertainment, etc.," Nancy Pompian, Dartmouth's student disability coordinator for the past 15 years, said in an e-mail.

Despite the number of disabled students who have graduated from Princeton and the current push to make the campus more accessible, the University still finds itself struggling with a basic shortage of resources — which may be preventing it from attracting significant numbers of disabled students.

"Right now we are in more of a reactive mode, where we are trying to adapt to individual needs," Silverman explained. "Other schools have a great reputation, like Brown where they have a lot of disabled students. But for one, they are bigger schools and they have bureaus for disabilities, where it's full-service, full-time management of these issues."

One of the biggest concerns Silverman cites as an obstacle for student admission is that the University does not provide training for students with disabilities on how to use the various technologies available. And with the amount of independent work required during junior and senior year at Princeton, she worries that students with disabilities may be discouraged by the level of self-sufficiency necessary to succeed at the University.

"If a student wants that attention and help, we can't do that — we just don't have the staff," she said. "I would say that if a student comes to the University and does not know how to use a lot of the programs and computers, we are not in a position to train the student. If we had more tech help and staffing, then we would be better off."

With Swords soon ending her first semester as a sophomore and nearing the beginning of intensive independent work, she echoed the same concerns.

"When I first came here I didn't know how to use the Internet and I still don't," she said, explaining that CIT tried to facilitate her learning, but that the student sent to help her was unfamiliar with technology for the blind and was ineffective. "I am hoping to study abroad next year, and since I can't get the training here and be able to do things on my own now, I won't be able to do it there."