Alec Massey
Features Editor
The Report a Barrier Initiative works to make campus more accessible. Anyone can report a barrier by sending their concern to the ADA Office email, ada@sewanee.edu, or they can scan the QR code on the posters that the office is working to distribute around campus. A barrier consists of anything from blocked paths to broken website links.
For more context on the creation of the initiative, ADA Director Matt Brown provided a brief history of the ADA office. Sewanee started focusing on ADA and accessibility in the mid-2010s. Before 2017, Student Accessibility Services (SAS) was based in the counseling center, and there was not one person dedicated to helping students with accommodations. Because of the overwhelming number of requests for help, the first director of SAS was hired in 2017 to allow for more room to better meet the needs of the students, and the office eventually moved out of the counseling center because of its success.
“We spent that time really just looking and supporting students and seeing where the holes in our buckets were,” Brown said, recounting the history of his office. He mentioned that the students were the top priority, and after they created a good system of support for them, then they could move to the community. Chief Diversity Officer Sydney Anderson Tompkins and Dr. Sylvia Gray took the needs of the community into consideration and worked together to create the position of ADA Director. Brown readily accepted the position as he has been involved with ADA work for a little over a decade. In the position, he could focus on reforming campus barriers to make them more accommodating to all employees and students.
One of the methods towards campus-wide accessibility is the Report a Barrier Initiative which went through a test run in the Advent semester of 2023. Last semester, the ADA office received 12 reports with little advertisement and was able to process all but 2 of them as they require long-term construction. “We don’t have unlimited resources to fix things; so, part of what this form does is to help us prioritize,” Director Brown said, describing the program.
The test run allowed them to figure out ways to efficiently process reports and create effective plans for future construction. The effect of the initiative will not be immediate as the process takes time, but they highly encourage everyone to report a barrier if they encounter one. The ADA Office has received more student feedback than in previous years, and Matt Brown attributes that to the office’s establishing a trustworthy system and the stigma around disability decreasing in the past few years. Because of the increasing number of reports, the initiative relies heavily on student and employee feedback in order to touch on the most pressing issues.
Along with the Report a Barrier initiative the ADA office has been developing other programs for increased accessibility. Blackboard Ally, for example, is a program on BrightSpace that makes sure all the content can be easily accessed by students. Brown is also working with Human Resources to rework their process of providing employees with accommodations to ensure that they are getting enough support.
“It’s been this long timeline [where] we see what we need; let’s do what we can; okay, we need a little bit more. Okay, we need a little bit more, and it’s led [us] here,” Brown said about the progression of the ADA office’s method of restructuring barriers. The initiative will hopefully create a safer and more successful experience for all at Sewanee, and the ADA office will work on putting more posters out so that everyone can easily report a barrier.