When Viviane Ackall, M.S., Director for LCI – SAC Student Accessibility Center at North Carolina Central University, reflects on her career in disability services, the arc is striking. "I went from working with paper, everything in paper and paper folders, to working with a homemade program..." she says. "So when I came to North Carolina Central, that was my first experience with Accommodate."
Two and a half years in, she hasn't looked back.
For a small but busy accessibility office, consolidation matters. Before Accommodate, scattered documentation and disconnected systems made everyday tasks more complicated than they needed to be. Now, Viviane's team has documentation, notes, student statements, meeting notes, emails, and class information all in a single platform.
"Everything is in one place," she says. "That to me is a great convenience."
The ability to email accommodation letters directly to professors and students simultaneously has been another standout feature, and one that saves meaningful time. So has the Outlook integration. "Being able to save notes directly from Outlook is a convenience. We don't have to be copying and pasting. It's a one-time deal."
One of the biggest operational shifts since adopting Accommodate has been around reporting. NCCU's accessibility center reports to their Vice Chancellor biweekly with student counts, contacts, new requests, complaints, etc. Generating that data used to be a grind.
Not anymore. "We can run the report, automatic run — that is a life-saving," Viviane says. "It does make our lives so much easier than trying to print every single page or create a document."
She recalls managing a student file with over 300 documents. The idea of compiling that manually ,saving each piece separately, printing and scanning, assembling it all, is almost unthinkable now. "I could not even imagine how burdensome it would be."
Viviane's onboarding experience was anything but ideal, and Accommodate still held up. She started her role with limited staff, right in the thick of spring semester, and the university had just experienced a challenge that cut off her access to email for a month. Accommodate was essentially all she had to work with.
"I thought it was pretty intuitive to work without having a training or any time to be learning the process slowly," she says. "It was pretty much just try and look and make sure I don't save anything or delete anything — but I thought it was an easy program."
The one area she'd flag as a steeper curve? Reports. She's candid about it: "I still think they're hard." But that's where her client success manager, Holly, comes in.
Ask Viviane what she values most about Accommodate, and she'll tell you: it's Holly.
"I haven't had that in other places," she says. "She is always available, she's always pleasant. She never criticizes me when I ask silly questions — questions that I should know the answer to by now." Viviane emailed her at noon recently and had her answer within 15 minutes. "That is amazing."
For a team that describes itself as working more in the humanities and psychology space than in tech, having responsive, patient support makes a real difference. Holly regularly helps build and run the biweekly reports, proactively offers suggestions, and meets the team where they are. "Having somebody that can assist with the computer needs, so fast and so pleasantly — that is the greatest advantage of using Accommodate."
For schools still weighing the move to a new platform, Viviane has a simple message: just do it.
"It might take a little bit to learn a new trick," she says, "but once you learn it, it's going to make your life so much faster and easier that it is worth going through the trouble of moving from one database to the other."
Her advice for making the transition? "Rip it like a band-aid and move on."