As somebody with vision difficulties, I find that on-campus accessibility can sometimes become a little challenging. From trying to get an accommodation letter to navigating around campus, there are quite a few challenges when it comes to my accessibility.
When I was a freshman, I didn’t fully understand how to obtain accommodation letters or what they were, as I wasn’t provided with much information about that aspect of college life. I needed to get my 504 plan from high school, which was on my old Google Drive that had been deleted. I didn’t save my 504 plan because I didn’t think I’d need it again, so I had to call my high school to see if they had it, which took a while because they don’t typically save graduates’ 504 plans.
From there, it took about two weeks before my accommodation letter was ready and could be sent to my professors. At this point, I already had to advocate for myself within my classes to help them acknowledge my disability, but some of them said it was hard to believe without the accommodation letter, which was an additional struggle.
Beyond trying to figure out accommodation letters, there is a lot of difficulty when it comes to navigating campus because I often find some of the stairs around campus to be challenging. The worst set of stairs by far are the ones going down to the Winslow parking lot from Carpenter, as they’re rocky and uneven, and also vary in width, making them exceptionally difficult to use.
For a little while, I lived on the first floor of Van Winkle, and the stairs there are pretty bad, too. Thankfully, there is a ramp option for actually getting up to the building and getting inside, but when it came to the actual stairs going down, they were all black and had a similar texture, which is hard enough to see to begin with. However, my glasses are transition lenses, so they become sunglasses in daylight. When I first entered the building and went down the stairs to my floor, it was nearly impossible to see the difference in the steps, which was a significant hazard for me.
I think that this campus could easily become better in some areas with accessibility, especially when it comes to on-campus navigation, as that’s such a big part of campus life, especially when you live on campus and don’t have the option to avoid the living situation you’re placed in.
–Oct. 7, 2025–
