By Angus Frame
Bill Byrne won’t be in his office during this year’s examination period. He’s not an irresponsible Ryerson professor, he’s the manager of Ryerson’s Access Centre and his office, along with all the other offices in the centre, are going to be used as testing rooms for students with disabilities.
“There will be 30 staff computers made available to handicapped students during exam time,” Byrne said. “My office gets divided into two and can be used for students who need it to write exams.”
Fifty to 60 students with disabilities can write exams at one time.
The Access Centre, on the third floor of Jorgenson Hall, helps anyone on campus who needs assistance because of a disability. This year it helped 753 students with special needs.
“Ryerson is one of the easier campuses to get around on because the buildings aren’t that old,” Byrne said. But Ryerson isn’t perfect. Oakham House and O’Keefe House are not accessible to disabled students. Byrne said that this problem had been studied, but hasn’t been remedied yet because the solution is linked to the building of a campus centre.
“The plan was to build the campus centre and connect it to the two other buildings and make all three accessible,” Byrne said.
Though the campus centre is still only a dream, Byrne says that the Access Centre makes it possible for all students to use the facilities at Ryerson. If a club meets in an inaccessible second floor room at Oakham House and a disabled student wants to join the club, the Centre will ask the club to meet in another room. No one has ever turned down this request.
“We have to keep in mind that the idea is to give every student access to the facilities needed,” Byrne said.
The Centre also gives professors a package which advises them on how best to teach disabled students.
The Centre houses special equipment for disabled students. Byrne proudly explains how the $12,000 personal reader in the Centre works.
“A student who has trouble seeing places a page on the reader, the reader will then read the text to the student in a voice chosen by the student. It can also transfer the text over to computer and print it up,” Byrne said.
Byrne is part of a six person committee which is investigating a problem facing some disabled students. It seems that some students, because of their disabilities, are forced to spend an extra year or half-year at Ryerson to finish their degrees. And they have to pay for the extra year of schooling that is required because they are disabled.
Byrne’s committee has been reviewing this problem and the Board of Governors will decide on a course of action in the next few months.
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