Note-Takers and Note-Taking Support

A note-taker and permission to record are two different accommodations. They address different barriers, they come from different parts of the regulation, they fail in different ways, and a student who needs one and is given the other has not been accommodated. This page covers note-taking support. Recording is covered separately at recording lectures and class sessions, and real-time speech-to-text at CART, captioning and interpreters.

What a note-taker is, and what it is not

Note-taking support means someone else produces a usable record of the class. You are not required to do anything during the session to obtain it. That is the defining feature and the reason it is a distinct accommodation.

Forms it takes:

Peer note-taker — a classmate, usually recruited by the instructor or disability office, often anonymous, sometimes paid or credited.
Professional or staff note-taker — more common in graduate, clinical, and professional programs.
Shared institutional notes — the instructor’s own outline, slides, or lecture notes released before or after class.
Smartpen or synchronized-notes technology — a device that links your own handwriting to audio, so a mark in your notes returns you to that moment. This is a hybrid and worth naming separately when you request it.
Speech-to-text output used as notes, which overlaps with CART but is not the same service.

What it is not: it is not a transcript, it is not a substitute for attending, and it is not a study guide. A note-taker records the class, not the answers.

Why schools provide it

Note-taking is a compound task — listen, comprehend, judge relevance, write, and keep listening while writing. A disability can break any link in that chain, and when it does the student is forced to choose between understanding the class and having a record of it.

The regulatory basis is 34 C.F.R. § 104.44(d), which requires institutions to provide auxiliary aids to students with impaired sensory, manual, or speaking skills, and names examples including taped texts, interpreters, readers in libraries, and adapted classroom equipment. The Office for Civil Rights lists notetakers expressly among the auxiliary aids postsecondary institutions may be required to supply, alongside readers, interpreters, and specialized computer equipment.

Two features of § 104.44(d) matter and are frequently overlooked:

The institution pays. OCR is explicit that institutions cannot require students to pay for necessary aids, cannot refuse on cost grounds, cannot cap what they spend on auxiliary aids, and cannot condition provision on the availability of funds.
There is a personal-services boundary. The regulation does not require attendants, individually prescribed devices, readers for personal use or study, or other devices or services of a personal nature. OCR draws the line at classroom use: readers may be required for the classroom but not for individual study time. Institutions sometimes stretch this to cover note-taking, which is a classroom-access service. That is worth contesting precisely.

Who it is for

Note-taking support is most often appropriate where the limitation affects the production of a record or the ability to do two things at once:

Motor impairments — tremor, arthritis, repetitive strain injury, dysgraphia, limited hand function, pain on sustained writing.
Visual impairment, where writing while watching a board is not possible.
Hearing impairment, where following a speaker consumes the attention that note-taking would need — though here CART or interpreting is often the primary aid and notes the supplement.
Processing speed deficits, where the lecture outruns the pen.
ADHD and attention regulation, where the act of writing costs the thread.
Cognitive effects of chronic illness, medication, chemotherapy, epilepsy treatment, or post-concussive syndrome.
Conditions causing intermittent absence, where the gap is unpredictable. OCR’s fact sheets on epilepsy, migraine, sickle cell disease, inflammatory bowel disease, cancer and GERD all contemplate instructional material being made available when symptoms intensify.

Where it goes wrong

This accommodation is refused far less often than it is quietly botched. The failure modes are predictable:

“We could not find a volunteer.” This is not a legal answer. If the school’s chosen delivery method fails, the obligation does not lapse — it owes an effective alternative. Put the failure in writing and ask what the alternative will be.
Notes that arrive too late to use. OCR requires aids to be provided in a timely manner to ensure effective participation, and states that where a student’s eligibility is still being evaluated, the institution must provide auxiliary aids in the interim.
Notes of unusable quality. Raise it in week two, not at the midterm. Two weeks of unusable notes is two weeks of lost material and a much harder conversation later.
No plan for labs, clinics, studios, and field placements, which are usually outside whatever system produces classroom notes.
The note-taker drops the course. Ask at the outset what happens then.

Effectiveness is the standard, and you get a say

OCR’s position on choosing among aids is worth quoting in substance, because it cuts both ways. The institution has flexibility in choosing the specific aid or service it provides, as long as the aid selected is effective, and those aids “should be selected after consultation with the student.” But under Title II of the ADA — public institutions — OCR states the institution must give primary consideration to the requests of individuals with disabilities.

OCR also notes that not all students with a similar disability benefit equally from an identical auxiliary aid, and that what works depends on context: the assistance a student who is hard of hearing needs in a large lecture hall may differ from what they need in a seminar.

So the argument, when a school offers something you know will not work, is not “I want a different one.” It is: this aid is not effective for me, in this setting, for these reasons — and, at a public institution, that your own request is entitled to primary consideration.

Other accommodations students ask for

Which accommodation fits depends on the barrier, not the diagnosis, and most students need more than one. These pages cover the others most often requested:

The law that governs a college accommodation request

Two statutes do the work. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794, reaches every school that takes federal money — which is very nearly all of them. The ADA covers the rest: Title II for public colleges and universities, Title III for private ones as places of public accommodation. In the Eleventh Circuit, which governs Florida, claims under the two are analyzed under the same standards.

The regulation that actually decides most disputes is 34 C.F.R. § 104.44, and it is worth knowing what it says on both sides of the line.

What it requires. A college must modify academic requirements where necessary so they do not discriminate — and the regulation names examples: changes in the length of time permitted to complete a degree, substitution of specific courses, and adaptation of how a course is conducted. It requires modified examination formats so that results measure achievement rather than the disability, unless the disability is what the test is measuring. And it requires auxiliary aids — taped texts, interpreters, library readers, adapted classroom equipment.

What it expressly does not require. The same regulation says a college need not provide attendants, individually prescribed devices, readers for personal use or study, or other devices or services of a personal nature. A student who asks for a personal aide or a personal reader is asking for something § 104.44 does not oblige the school to supply, and it is better to know that at the outset. The regulation also provides that academic requirements the school can demonstrate are essential to the instruction, or to a directly related licensing requirement, are not discriminatory.

“Otherwise qualified” — and where Florida students lose

Protection runs only to a student who is “otherwise qualified.” Under Southeastern Community College v. Davis, 442 U.S. 397 (1979), that means able to meet the program’s requirements in spite of the disability, and the statute does not require substantial modifications to the program itself. The Eleventh Circuit put it plainly in Goldberg v. Florida International University, 838 F. App’x 487 (11th Cir. 2020): a qualified student is one who can meet the program’s academic standards with or without accommodations.

The recent Florida cases show where that bites. In Nehme v. Florida International University Board of Trustees, 121 F.4th 1379 (11th Cir. 2024), a medical student who failed at least eight courses — five of them after being placed on academic probation — was held not to be a qualified individual, and it counted against him that he conceded he had received proper accommodations for four of the failed exams. In J.A.M. v. Nova Southeastern University, 646 F. App’x 921 (11th Cir. 2016), repeated extended leaves of absence, exam rescheduling and excusal of misconduct were held to be accommodations that would fundamentally alter an osteopathic medicine program.

The practical lesson runs the other way, though, and it is the reason timing matters more than almost anything else: accommodations are forward-looking. A request made after a run of failures is fighting the record those failures created. The same request made before them is a different case entirely.

The school has to actually think about it — the strongest student-side rule

Deference to academic judgment is real. Courts will not override a genuinely academic decision unless it is “such a substantial departure from accepted academic norms as to demonstrate that the person or committee responsible did not actually exercise professional judgment” — Regents of University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214, 225 (1985) — and courts in Florida give the same respect to a school’s judgment about the qualifications its program requires. But deference is earned, not assumed, and that is where cases are won.

Under Wynne v. Tufts University School of Medicine, 932 F.2d 19 (1st Cir. 1991) (en banc) — applied in Florida in Forbes v. St. Thomas University, 768 F. Supp. 2d 1222 (S.D. Fla. 2010), aff’d, 456 F. App’x 809 (11th Cir. 2012) — a school has “a real obligation” to “seek suitable means of reasonably accommodating” a student with a disability, and has to put in a factual record showing that its officials “considered alternative means, their feasibility, cost and effect on the academic program” before concluding that no reasonable accommodation was available. A conclusory assertion, with no evidence of deliberate consideration, is not enough. So the question to ask of any denial is not only “was this decision right?” but “is there any record that anyone actually weighed the alternatives?” Often there is not.

Two further points help. Whether an accommodation would impose an undue burden or fundamentally alter a program is generally a question of fact — Redding v. Nova Southeastern University, 165 F. Supp. 3d 1274 (S.D. Fla. 2016) — which means it is not something a school can simply assert its way past. And to establish fundamental alteration a school has to identify the essential requirement, show that modifying it goes to the core of the program, and show it considered whether any lesser alternative existed.

The interactive process, and a warning about how students lose it

Section 504 and the ADA do not use the phrase “interactive process” for college students the way employment law does, and the Eleventh Circuit has not held in a published decision that failing to engage in one is independently actionable — that remains unsettled. What Florida courts do recognize, from Forbes, is that the process is genuinely two-sided: the student carries the initial burden to identify the disability and make the case for specific accommodations, after which the school must consider the request and make a reasoned decision.

Here is the warning. In Amy v. Florida International University Board of Trustees, 2024 WL 5323717 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 20, 2024), the court found that the student broke down the interactive process by insisting on one particular accommodation and resisting any alternative. Where a school does not obstruct the process and makes reasonable efforts to communicate and to accommodate on the information it has, liability does not follow. Refusing every alternative on offer is a way to lose a case that could have been won — ask for what you need, but engage with what is proposed, and put the reasons in writing.

Technical standards

Published technical standards get real deference. Following Southeastern Community College v. Davis, the Eleventh Circuit treats a school’s academic standards as entitled to deference as the statement of the qualifications its program requires: Wood v. President & Trustees of Spring Hill College, 978 F.2d 1214, 1222–23 (11th Cir. 1992); see also Redding v. Nova Southeastern University, 165 F. Supp. 3d 1274, 1285 (S.D. Fla. 2016). They are not untouchable. The Section 504 regulation shields only the academic requirements a school can demonstrate are essential to the instruction or to a directly related licensing requirement, 34 C.F.R. § 104.44(a), so the showing is the school’s to make. And under Wynne, the school has to show that the people responsible actually considered the alternatives — their feasibility, cost and effect on the program — rather than simply pointing to the standard. Courts will not second-guess curriculum or clinical content on a thin record, but a standard that appears nowhere until the moment it is used to exclude a student is a different matter from one published and applied consistently for years.

Retaliation

Asking for accommodations is protected activity, and so is complaining about how a request was handled. A retaliation claim requires protected activity, the school’s knowledge of it, an adverse action, and a causal link — with but-for causation, and the familiar burden-shifting that follows. Retaliation claims sometimes survive where the underlying accommodation claim does not, because they turn on what the school did after the request rather than on whether the student was qualified.

Where to complain, and what it is worth

There are two routes and they are not alternatives you have to choose between carefully — a student may do both.

The Office for Civil Rights. A complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s OCR must be filed within 180 days of the discriminatory act. It costs nothing and needs no lawyer, though what you put in it matters.

Court. A postsecondary student does not have to exhaust administrative remedies before suing under Section 504 or the ADA. Filing with OCR is not a prerequisite.

On remedies, be realistic. Injunctive relief — reinstatement, the accommodation itself, correction of a record — and attorney’s fees do not require proof of intentional discrimination. Money damages do, generally shown through deliberate indifference: that the school knew of a substantial risk of discrimination and failed to act.

And one recent development that changes what these cases are worth. In Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, 596 U.S. 212 (2022), the Supreme Court held that emotional distress damages are not recoverable under Section 504, because it was enacted under the Spending Clause and funding recipients never consented to that exposure. The Eleventh Circuit extended that to ADA Title II in A.W. v. Coweta County School District, 110 F.4th 1309 (11th Cir. 2024). Earlier Eleventh Circuit authority allowing emotional distress damages, Sheely v. MRI Radiology Network, 505 F.3d 1173 (11th Cir. 2007), no longer holds. For most students this means the value of a case lies in getting the accommodation, the place, or the record put right — not in a damages award for the distress of the fight.

This page describes how these rules work in general. It is not legal advice about your situation, and no outcome can be promised in any individual case.

Common questions

Can I be told to find my own note-taker?

Recruiting is ordinarily the institution’s job. Being asked to identify a willing classmate yourself, as a condition of receiving the aid, shifts the burden in a way worth questioning in writing.

Do I have to disclose my disability to the note-taker?

No. Peer note-taking is normally anonymous in both directions.

Can I have both a note-taker and permission to record?

Frequently that is the right combination, and they should be requested as two items rather than one. See recording lectures.

Is a note-taker a “personal service” the school need not provide?

Classroom note-taking is an access service, not a personal one. The personal-services exclusion in § 104.44(d) is aimed at attendants, individually prescribed devices, and readers for personal study.

What if the professor already posts slides?

Slides are not notes. Whether they are sufficient is an effectiveness question, and the answer is specific to the course.

This is an individualized, fact-specific inquiry

Every determination described on this page is individualized. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights says so directly: asked whether there is a list of all possible academic adjustments, OCR answers no — adjustments “must be individualized,” and “sometimes the most effective and practical academic adjustment for a given situation is a new solution rather than an off-the-shelf response.”

The lists on this page are examples. They are not comprehensive, they are not a menu, and they are not a ceiling. Two students with the same diagnosis can need entirely different adjustments, and OCR’s own guidance uses paired examples to make that point — one student whose treatment plan calls for supervision, another whose plan calls for privacy, same condition, opposite accommodation. A school that applies a fixed package to everyone with a particular condition has already made an error, whatever the package contains.

Nothing here predicts what any particular school will do, or what any particular student is entitled to. That depends on facts this page cannot know.

This practice is student-side only

A Students’ Lawyer represents students and families. It does not advise, defend, or consult for colleges, universities, testing agencies, or licensing boards. Knowing how a school is supposed to run this analysis is what makes it possible to show when it has not — where the interactive process was skipped, where an essential-requirement finding was assumed rather than made, where a denial rests on a blanket policy rather than on this student’s documentation. The standard reads the same from either chair. The reason to know it cold is to hold the institution to it.

When it is time to call a lawyer

Most accommodation requests should never involve counsel. Register, document, ask, receive. The moments that actually warrant a call are narrower and more specific:

The denial rests on a policy rather than on you. “We don’t do that” and “that isn’t one of our accommodations” are not individualized assessments, and OCR has said as much.
An essential requirement is invoked but cannot be found in writing. A technical standard or program requirement that appears for the first time in your denial letter is worth examining.
The school offers withdrawal, a leave, or a lighter program instead of a modification it never evaluated.
Something changed after you asked. Requesting a modification is itself protected activity, and a grade, a referral, a schedule, or a tone that shifts afterward raises a separate retaliation question that does not depend on whether the original request was correct.
A deadline is running. Internal appeal windows are short, an OCR complaint is generally due within 180 days, and a graduation or licensure date does not wait.
The stakes have escalated. Once probation, dismissal, a conduct referral, or a technical-standards determination is on the table, the matter is no longer an accommodation request.

These are fact-specific questions, and the answer usually turns on details — what was asked, in what words, to whom, and what the file says. If you are not sure whether your situation is one of these, that uncertainty is itself a reasonable reason to ask.

Get in touch to talk through a specific situation, whether you are a student or a family.

General information about disability law in education. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it cannot account for the facts of your situation or the law of your jurisdiction. Guidance documents from the Office for Civil Rights are cited throughout; OCR guidance does not itself have the force and effect of law, and OCR states that its enforcement determinations are based on the particular factual circumstances of each individual case.