The pressure on disability services offices has never been higher. Student accommodation requests are up. Title II ADA requirements are tighter. And DSPS directors are expected to do more faster, with the same (or fewer) resources.
The good news: a well-built accommodation process doesn't just keep you compliant. It builds trust with students, reduces institutional risk, and frees your team to do the work that actually matters.
Here's where to start...
Every accommodation workflow lives or dies at intake. If your process is paper-based, email-driven, or relies on students tracking down the right person, you're already behind.
A compliant intake process needs to:
That last point matters more than most directors realize. When a student files a complaint, or an OCR audit lands on your desk, documentation is everything. If it isn't in the system, it didn't happen. Becky Kuszynski, Accessibility Resources Manager at Moriane Park Technical college, swears by that mantra. ⤵️
"If I get a question about a student, the first place I'm going to go is case notes [in Accommodate]. I'm going to see what all the contacts were with the student, and then I'm going to dive into the documentation or the plan to help get my question answered before I even go to my accessibility specialist. I tell my team: if you don't document it, it never happened."
Symplicity Accommodate gives students a single, accessible portal to submit requests, upload documentation, and track their status in real time. No emails lost in inboxes. No sticky notes on someone's desk.
The ADA requires an "interactive process" between the institution and the student when determining reasonable accommodations. What that looks like in practice varies, but the documentation standard doesn't: you need a record of every touchpoint.
Build a consistent workflow that captures:
Accommodate makes this manageable at scale. Case notes, status updates, and communication logs are centralized, so whether you're handling 200 cases or 2,000, your team isn't piecing together decisions from memory.
A compliant accommodation process isn't built in a vacuum: it's built around three overlapping legal frameworks that every DSPS director needs to understand cold.
ADA Title II prohibits public colleges and universities from discriminating against individuals with disabilities in their programs, services, and activities. The 2024 updates tightened requirements significantly, including new mandates around web and mobile accessibility. Title II is the law most visibly in play when a student files an OCR complaint.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act applies to any institution receiving federal funding, which is essentially every college and university in the country. It requires institutions to provide reasonable accommodations and prohibits exclusion from programs on the basis of disability. Section 504 and the ADA largely overlap in practice, but 504 applies to a broader set of programs and has its own compliance infrastructure, including the requirement to designate a 504 Coordinator.
FERPA governs how student disability records are handled, stored, and shared. Accommodation documentation (diagnostic records, letters, case notes) is subject to FERPA's privacy protections. That means your accommodation process can't just be compliant with disability law; it also has to be compliant with education privacy law. Who can access what, and under what circumstances, needs to be clearly defined and consistently enforced.
The practical implication: your accommodation process has to satisfy all three simultaneously. A well-documented case that leaks student disability information to an unauthorized party is a FERPA violation. An accessible intake portal that doesn't maintain the right audit trail is an ADA risk. Getting this right requires systems designed for it, not workarounds built on shared drives and email threads.
You've done the hard work. You've reviewed the request, made a determination, and drafted the accommodation letter. Then it sits in a queue waiting for faculty to open an email.
Faculty communication is a chronic weak point in accommodation compliance, and it's one of the most common sources of student grievances. Students shouldn't have to chase down their own accommodations.
Curtis Bobray, Senior Special Services Counselor at Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC), recently noted that Accommodate has made their faculty relationship smoother. With training videos housed directly in the system and accommodation letters accessible at faculty fingertips, the back-and-forth has been reduced significantly.
"Faculty have told us that having this in Accommodate made it so much easier to understand how to implement accommodations," he said.
With Symplicity Accommodate, faculty notification is built into the workflow. Letters go out automatically, faculty can acknowledge receipt, and students can see when their instructors have been informed. The loop closes. Everyone knows where things stand.
OCR complaints and internal audits have a way of arriving at the worst possible time. If your records are scattered across spreadsheets, email threads, and filing cabinets, reconstructing a compliance case is a living nightmare.
Audit-ready means:
Accommodate's reporting tools give DSPS directors real visibility: how long cases take, where bottlenecks are, which departments are acknowledging letters and which aren't. That data isn't just useful for audits, it's useful for making the case to leadership that your office needs more resources!
ADA compliance isn't a checkbox. It's an ongoing operational commitment, and the institutions that get it right have one thing in common: they've built systems that make the right process the easy process.
Symplicity Accommodate was built specifically for disability services offices navigating exactly this challenge. From intake to faculty notification to reporting, it's the infrastructure your compliance process deserves.
Ready to see it in action? Request a demo today.