Five sentence summary:
If you're denied accommodations, you don't have to accept this and give up. Deciding whether or not to escalate things means considering your health and what evidence you have, and your next steps will depend slightly on what options you've already taken. There are avenues inside your school and outside if you're denied an accommodation. Depending on the department you speak with and the process you take, resolving these conflicts can take weeks, months, or even years. They can also require a lot of your time and energy, so it is crucial to have a good support system.
If you're denied your accommodations or are discriminated against because of your disability, you don't have to give up and accept your fate. That said, fighting for your rights is just that, a fight. It is often exhausting, it can be demeaning, and retaliation is not unheard of. It can also take a lot of time. Professors violate the ADA all the time (on a related note, you should know how the ADA protects you).
Things to consider before proceeding
Potential resources and avenues inside your school
I hate to say it, but you should be cautious when speaking with some of these offices. No, not everyone is evil or out to get you, but in many cases their goal is to protect the university. They want problems to go away quickly and quietly. It's worth keeping this in mind. Potential resources and avenues outside of your school
You can file a complaint online with this office*. You can also file a complaint on behalf of another individual if you have written permission from that person. The complaint must be filed within 180 days of the last discriminatory act, although you can file a request for a waiver if you believe you have good cause for not filing sooner. You can file a complaint with the OCR even if you haven't filed an official complaint within your university or college itself. If there is a process within your school but you don't feel comfortable using it, OCR is still open. You can see all currently pending cases against schools, including colleges and universities, for disability discrimination by sub categories. For example, here are all pending cases involving academic adjustments. It's important to know that search results are organized by the types of discrimination issues under investigation and not the number of open investigations at an institution. So, you could search for academic adjustment discrimination and a college will appear only once even if it has multiple pending cases about academic adjustments. *It's important to note that you will likely not have anything resolved within a semester through this route. Some of these investigations take years, so if you're looking for action within a few weeks or sooner, your best bet is probably looking at options within your institution or finding a lawyer. No matter what avenue you pursue, or if you pursue any further action, it's worth thinking about getting the refusal to adhere to an accommodation on the record somewhere. This is not to say you must do this, again, all of these steps and processes involve work and can be exhausting. You may also experience retaliation (other professors hesitant to write a letter of recommendation, take you on as a student in grad school, etc). That said, filing a complaint with OCR, writing a letter to the dean of the college, or including the discrimination and refusal on the course evaluation are ways of making it a little bit harder to sweep the discrimination under the rug. Will one comment in a course evaluation matter? No, probably not, but who knows how many times this has happened, and multiple comments will send up red flags. You never know where the allies are. Five years from now, with a new department chair, all of the comments in the course evaluations about how discriminatory this professor was may mean they aren't awarded tenure and need to find employment somewhere else. Again, this doesn't mean you HAVE to file a written complaint, but if you're wondering what's the point, this is worth considering.
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