Students with disabilities are covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, which requires that buildings be accessible by individuals with physical disabilities. This includes the presence of ramps where necessary to allow access to rooms, elevators to permit access to upper levels of a building, braille labels for rooms and facilities for the visually impaired, emergency systems that include both auditory and visual components, and the appropriate facilities in the restrooms for each gender.
Students with disabilities have the right to have their physical and learning disabilities accommodated in the classrooms. This includes special reading materials, the use of special equipment for note taking, and test taking arrangements that allow individuals with learning or physical disabilities to compete on an even playing field with their non-impaired classmates. These include special educators trained to work with students with particular disabilities, extra time for individuals with reading or writing impairments, and a special test proctor to work one on one with a visually impaired student.
Students have the legal right not to have their disabilities be a factor in the admissions process for primary, secondary or post secondary schools. Schools are not allowed to ask applicants if they have disabilities, to prevent discrimination either on the basis of having a disability in the first place or for fear of incurring additional costs in the process of accommodating those students. Schools can only ask about disabilities after a student has been admitted so they can prepare for any necessary accommodations.
The rights that students have to accommodations in classroom instruction and testing extends to the standardized testing for states and college admissions. Students with an official Individualized Educational Plan, the document that assesses a student's disability and how to accommodate the student, can have special proctors or extra time, so long as they notify the testing service when they register for the exam. While testing services can note on exam scores that tests were taken under special circumstances, they cannot grade the exam differently and schools cannot weight the scores differently in admissions decisions.