For instructors
What an accommodation actually looks like on a Tuesday, and why the student in your class who has one is still struggling to start.
The gap between the letter and the week
You get a letter from disability services. Extended time, maybe a note-taker, maybe flexible deadlines. You honor it.
Then the student misses the first draft anyway, and nothing in the letter explained why.
The letter describes an entitlement. It does not describe the failure mode. For a large share of students with ADHD or autism, the binding constraint is not how long the exam is. It is that a project with no obvious first move does not get started, and a deadline three weeks out does not feel real until it is four days out, at which point the work that remains is not four days of work.
What this tool is doing on their side
It breaks assignments into steps small enough to begin. It sorts what is doable against the capacity they actually have that day. It stops presenting an undifferentiated list that makes a twenty-minute reading and a twelve-page paper look identical.
None of that requires anything from you.
This is not an accommodation
Everything below helps the whole room. A published due date and a written first step are better teaching for the student with a job, the student whose first language is not English, the overloaded senior, and the one who simply has not learned yet how to start a large thing. The students with letters are the ones for whom the absence is disqualifying rather than merely hard.
Which is the useful frame: you are not being asked to do something extra for a few. You are being asked to remove a barrier that is costing you a slice of the whole class.
What would help, and costs you little
A due date that exists when you publish the syllabus. Not “TBD.” A student who cannot feel time needs the anchor early, even if you move it later.
A first step, written down. Not the whole plan — the first move. “Bring a thesis sentence to office hours by the 14th.” “Have your apparatus list checked by Thursday.” “Push one commit that prints anything.” One line in an assignment description, and it is the highest-leverage thing an instructor can do here.
Structure over reminders. They have reminders. What they lack is a shape.
What you will not get from us
We do not send you reports on your students. We do not tell you who in your class has an accommodation. We do not sync to your LMS and we are not asking you to adopt anything.
A student’s disability status, energy data, and accommodation records are theirs to disclose. If a student chooses to share something with you, that is their decision. The student’s own consent record notes what they chose to share and when, so they can see and revoke it. Nothing about you is recorded.
There is nothing here for you to sign up for
That is deliberate. The single most useful thing an instructor can do costs nothing and involves no software: write the first step into the assignment description. “Bring a thesis sentence to office hours by the 14th” converts a wall into a door.
There is no longer version to send you to yet. The resources here are written for families — FERPA, and what happens to an IEP at graduation — not for you.