Many students with disabilities use accessibility features and accommodations during instruction and when taking assessments. It is important to consider student perceptions about what works and their preferences when making accessibility and accommodations decisions. Students are often the best source of information about their strengths and needs, and what helps.

NCEO recently published a brief titled Suggestions for Involving Students in Selecting and Implementing Accommodations (NCEO Brief #30), which contains a summary of the findings of research studies on student perceptions for selected accommodations including human read-aloud, text-to-speech, scribe, speech-to-text, extended time, and calculator. The research studies were conducted between 1999 and 2021.

Overall, the research studies found that students had positive perceptions of accommodations. However, many students had significant concerns about the social stigma of accommodations that were obvious to other students or called attention to their disability. For example, some students had negative perceptions of accommodations that removed them from the regular classroom or required the use of materials or equipment that were readily noticeable to other students (e.g., some types of assistive technology).

The brief included the following questions that can be used to help guide accessibility discussions with students:

• What parts of learning are easiest for you?
• What is something in class that you do well?
• What parts of learning are most difficult for you?
• What is something you did in class that is hard?
• Do you use <<insert accommodation name>> during instruction? Is it helpful?

Following the administration of a test, the following questions can be used to help guide discussions with the student:

• Did you use <<insert accommodation name>>? If so, was it helpful? How was it helpful? 
• Were there any difficulties with the accommodations? (Are adjustments needed?)
• Should this accommodation be used again?