Filling in the Map
Let’s face it. The legal side of disability services work can be overwhelming, confusing, and stressful. It’s a gray world out there when it comes to decision making, and legal precedents are a critical aspect of navigating the murky territory of accommodation requests, as well as proactively addressing accessibility needs.
While case documents created by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) are a matter of public record, and can be accessed at the OCR’s Reading Room, the reality is that the current iteration of this tool is less than ideal. Most importantly, if a user is not already aware of a specific case, locating a case relevant to a scenario or question is exceptionally challenging, especially when time is of the essence, which is so often the case when in a position that requires legal research. Moreover, in recent years, some records (mostly those related to race/ethnicity and gender) have begun to be removed from the OCR’s public-facing recordkeeping systems altogether, introducing concerns that other records related to marginalized communities, such as those related to disability, may meet the same fate.
At Access Navigators, we believe that keeping up with, accessing, and utilizing these cases is critical to higher education disability and accessibility work. And yet…there didn’t seem to be an organized, usable tool that allowed for the realization of this goal. So we thought…if there isn’t a way to do this right now, why don’t we make one? And thus Access Navigators Network was born.
Our Goal
At Access Navigators Network, we’re driven by a core philosophy that this resource should be:
Searchable: Users can search within both the actual text of case records, as well as within human-created (not AI!) summaries, in order to quickly locate records based on key words or phrases
Filterable: Records have been tagged (by a human!) with a number of organizational parameters, such as year, region, institutional type, case disposition, and subject factors like specific accommodations or meta-categories to allow for searching that can be filtered to the criteria that matters to you most
Coming Soon! Organizable: Users can not only find what they’re looking for quickly, but can also interact with and organize what they’ve found in ways that allow for longitudinal, meaningful use, such as having the ability to download records, mark records as “favorites,” add user-driven tags, and track recently-accessed records
Coming Soon! Helpful: Membership includes regularly-updated resources that offer visual summaries/dashboards of key qualities and trends of available records and outcomes, such as how cases are distributed over time or by institutional characteristics
In other words, this is a resource that is usable and useful to the average person. Nothing over the top. Nothing extreme. Just an approachable database that is relevant to any disability services professional, from the seasoned administrator, to the career hopper, to the brand new hire.
