From Sept. 25-29, Colorado State University held its Disability Inclusion Week, a time dedicated for the CSU community come together to learn and share about disabilities. This event is crucial to the Student Disability Center because it helps spread information about various disabilities.

Alisha Zmuda, assistant director for operations and programming as well as acting coordinator of alternative testing accommodations at the SDC, was the main organizer of this event. Zmuda said planning for this event started in the summertime, and she met multiple times with each speaker in the event.

Zmuda said Disability Inclusion Week is just a small part of what the SDC does, and ultimately, they would like to branch out to more events.

“I think Disability Inclusion Week is just the very small bit of what we do on campus, and we haven’t actually been able to provide much programming in the past,” Zmuda said. “It’s not an area where we’ve had a ton of bandwidth, and so we’re hoping to expand some of that and provide more events.”

Zmuda went on to point out the main way the SDC helps support students who need accommodations: accommodation specialists.

Chelsea Hansen, administrative assistant at the Assistive Technology Resource Center, said this individualized process is what makes the CSU disability program so special.

“I do think that the ATRC is pretty unique … in that we have an entire center devoted to assistive technology,” Hansen said. “That’s fairly unusual for college campuses — and … the fact that we are able to meet with people one-on-one and do really individualized processes to help people figure out what kinds of technology will support them the best.”

Equitable care is important to make students with disabilities feel included. In addition to personalized care, CSU and the ATRC are also implementing technology for all students.

“We actually implemented about a year ago — a little over a year ago — a site-wide license for some tools called read speaker that are built into Canvas, and it’s a text-to-speech tool,” Hansen said. “It can do a lot more than that, but (it) essentially allows all people on campus who use Canvas at all to listen to Canvas web pages, other web pages and documents.”

Hansen went on to explain what universal design is and why it’s helpful. Universal design is when a school’s curriculum has accessibility resources built in to help all students, especially those with disabilities. Hansen said this helps people prepare for uncertain futures while still supporting their peers.

One of the biggest issues Disability Inclusion Week addresses is the stigma surrounding disabilities. Zmuda said there is a new group of students who are becoming more comfortable in conversations about disability.

“I think, you know, disability for a really long time was kind of frowned upon,” Zmuda said. “I think as a society overall, we have not always viewed disability in the best light, and so I think there’s still some stigma that we are trying to work through, and I think we’re in a really unique opportunity where our student population is growing. They are comfortable talking about their disabilities. They’re comfortable speaking about what they need and fighting for what they need.”

Discussions surrounding disability can be uncomfortable, but they can improve day-to-day for people with disabilities, making the effort worthwhile.

Disability Inclusion Week is just one way CSU is making an effort to acknowledge those with disabilities, as there is always a need for students to listen and learn about people with different types of disabilities.

Reach Jack Fillweber at life@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.