Note-Taking Accommodations: Options and How to Request One

Note-taking accommodations give students whose disability affects note-taking another way to get the class content: a peer note taker, the instructor's slides or notes, permission to record, or assistive software. At a US college you request them from the disability services office (Section 504 and the ADA); in K-12 schools they go into an IEP or a 504 plan.

Most offices offer a mix of these five. Names and details differ by school, so use the table as a list of what to ask about.

The Department of Education's own examples of what a college may provide include note takers and recording devices, alongside sign language interpreters, extended test time and adaptive software on school computers. Its pamphlet on hidden disabilities describes the classic case: a student whose learning disability or impaired vision affects note-taking “may need a notetaker or tape recorder.” For colleges, the Department's term is “academic adjustments”.

The rules change when you leave high school:

Your IEP does not carry over. The Department of Education says the IDEA and its IEP provisions do not apply to colleges, and that an IEP or 504 plan “may help identify services that have been effective for you” but is generally not sufficient documentation on its own. Keep copies of the plan and the evaluations behind it anyway: they show the college office what worked.

Still in high school? Under the IDEA, transition services belong in the IEP no later than the first IEP in effect when the student turns 16. Use those meetings to ask which note-taking support you will want in college and what documentation colleges ask for.

1. Find the office. Names vary: disability services, accessibility services, student access center. The Department of Education says colleges usually publish the procedure in catalogs, student handbooks and on their websites; if you cannot find it, ask an admissions officer or a counselor.
2. Ask as early as you can, ideally before the term starts. You can ask at any time, but some accommodations take longer to set up, and Appalachian State asks for peer note requests as early as possible each semester.
3. Gather documentation. Colleges may ask for a current diagnosis from a qualified professional, how the condition affects a major life activity, and how it affects your studies. Neither your high school nor your college has to pay for a new evaluation; if you are eligible for your state's vocational rehabilitation agency, it may evaluate you at no cost. Some offices start without full paperwork: Oregon's says documentation is encouraged but not always required, and it may set provisional accommodations for one term.
4. Meet the office. Describe the barrier, not just the diagnosis: you cannot listen and write at the same time, writing is slow or painful, you miss words you cannot hear. The college may give you what you asked for or offer an effective alternative.
5. Share the letter with each instructor, every term, and agree how and when you get slides or notes.
6. Sign any agreement, for recording or for a tool, before you use it. Then check the first week: are the notes arriving, and can you use them?
7. If it is not working, say so straight away. The Department of Education warns that waiting until the course is over may be too late. If the problem stays, go to the college's Section 504 or ADA coordinator, use its grievance procedure, or file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.

A peer note taker is a classmate who shares their notes with you after class. The office or the instructor recruits one, and Appalachian State tells its instructors that announcements for volunteers should protect your confidentiality. At the University of Kansas, notes can come from a volunteer classmate, a teaching assistant, or the instructor's own notes before class. At Kent State, if no peer note taker can be found, the office hires a student employee to attend class and take notes.

• Notes may arrive as typed documents, photos or handwritten copies.
• You still attend: Kansas gives notes only for classes you were present at.
• Keep taking your own notes. Peer notes fill the gaps; they do not replace yours.
• If notes stop arriving or are hard to use, tell the office in the first week, not the week before the exam.

Some offices now lead with technology instead. Kent State primarily uses a paid professional note-taking service: you record the lecture, upload it, and get notes within 48 hours, with the login provided at no cost to you. Oregon's Accessible Education Center lists audio recording, Livescribe pens, Glean and JamWorks, as well as slides and peer notetaking.

Permission to record is one of the most common note-taking accommodations, and the Section 504 regulation itself bars colleges from imposing rules on students with disabilities, such as a ban on tape recorders in classrooms, that limit their participation (34 CFR 104.44). Whether you may record without an accommodation is a different question, covered here:

With the accommodation, expect to sign an agreement first. The “Agreement for Recording of Lectures” at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) is typical. By signing it, you agree to:

• use the recordings for your personal study only, and for no other purpose;
• provide and run the recording device yourself;
• not share the recordings with anyone or make money from them;
• not publish, post or quote them without the instructor's explicit written consent;
• accept that the instructor may stop recording during personal discussions or self-disclosure;
• delete the recordings at the end of the semester.

Breaking it can cost you the permission to record in that course. The agreement also covers transcripts of the recordings. Oregon's version, signed online, names recordings and transcriptions alike, asks you to pause when classmates share personal information, bars quoting without the speaker's written consent, and warns of the student conduct process and copyright liability.

You can ask, and a diagnosis alone does not decide it. Under Section 504 a condition counts when it substantially limits a major life activity, and the examples Congress added in 2008 include reading, concentrating and thinking, as the Department of Education notes. In England, the DSA eligibility page names ADHD as an example of a specific learning difficulty. Your disability office makes the call.

Study habits that pair well with an accommodation (practical tips, not medical advice):

• Ask for the form that takes away listening and writing at the same time: slides before class, peer notes, or a recording with a transcript.
• Get the slides before the lecture and write on them, so you add ideas instead of copying.
• Use the same page layout in every class, such as Cornell notes, so there is nothing to decide mid-lecture.
• When you lose the thread, write the time and a question mark and keep going. Fill the gap afterwards from the recording or the notes.
• Review within 24 hours: Oregon's Accessible Education Center calls that the best time to go back over recordings and notes.
• Silence notifications on the laptop you take notes on.

Before college, the same supports appear in IEPs and 504 plans. Common ways teams write them:

• a copy of the teacher's notes or slides, before or after the lesson;
• guided notes: an outline with blanks the student fills in;
• notes from a peer;
• use of a recording device;
• speech-to-text or other assistive software.

Write down who provides it, when and in what form: “copy of notes” with no detail is easy to argue about later. Teachers must follow a student's 504 plan, the Department of Education says, and a district that fails to can be out of compliance with Section 504.

If you live in England and have a disability that affects your studies, including a specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia or ADHD, a mental health condition or a long-term health condition, you can apply for Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA). It pays for specialist equipment, non-medical helpers such as a British Sign Language interpreter or a specialist note taker, taxi travel when your disability stops you using public transport, and other study support: up to £27,783 a year. You do not pay it back, and it depends on your needs, not your household income.

• You need proof: for a specific learning difficulty, a diagnostic assessment from a practitioner psychologist or a suitably qualified specialist teacher. You must also be eligible for both a Tuition Fee Loan and a Maintenance Loan from Student Finance England.
• Apply through your student finance account, or on a DSA1 form if you need DSA only, study part-time or are a postgraduate. For courses starting from 1 January 2027, you apply through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement.
• A needs assessment follows: an informal meeting, not a test. Do not buy equipment before it; you will not be reimbursed.
• The Student Loans Company tells you within 4 weeks whether you are successful, and support can take up to 14 weeks to set up, so apply as soon as you can before the course starts.

The GOV.UK pages read for this guide cover students who live in England. Elsewhere, start with your university's disability or accessibility office.

Reline is the note-taking app we make, so weigh our view accordingly. It is a general note-taking app, not a disability-services product, and some offices supply their own software. Ask your office or instructor before you use it as part of an accommodation: their approval and your agreement come first.

If they say yes: the desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux (beta), or the web app in Chrome, records your laptop microphone in the hall and writes a live transcript as the lecturer speaks, in 60+ languages. In an online class the desktop app also records the computer's sound; on a Mac that uses an audio-only permission on macOS 14.2 or later and the screen recording permission on macOS 13 to 14.1, and below 13 only the microphone is recorded. In Chrome, for a lecture playing in a browser tab, you share that tab with its audio. Afterwards every transcript line has a play button, so you re-hear one explanation instead of the whole hour, and you can ask the chat a question and get an answer that quotes the transcript with timestamps. Add course names and jargon under Settings, Transcription, Personal terms so they are spelled right.

The limits, so you can describe it honestly to the office:

• No mobile app: you need a laptop in the room, close to the front.
• On the Free plan you get 10 hours of transcription and up to 1 hour of recording per note, so a 90-minute lecture does not fit in one Free note and a term of lectures runs past 10 hours. Paid plans lift both limits.
• Live only: there is no file upload, so you cannot import a recording you made earlier with another app.
• With one laptop microphone, every line is labelled Me. The beta Shared mic option numbers the voices it hears, and you name them yourself.
• Audio and transcript only: no video and no slides.
• Capture happens on your laptop, but transcription, AI features and storage run in the cloud.

When your agreement says to delete, delete the course's notes: moving a note to the trash and then deleting it permanently removes its recordings too.

• U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, "Students with Disabilities Preparing for Postsecondary Education: Know Your Rights and Responsibilities": ed.gov
• U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, "The Civil Rights of Students With Hidden Disabilities and Section 504": ed.gov
• U.S. Department of Education, "Frequently Asked Questions: Section 504 Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE)": ed.gov
• IDEA regulations, 34 CFR 300.320, "Definition of individualized education program": ecfr.gov
• Section 504 regulations, 34 CFR 104.44, "Academic adjustments": ecfr.gov
• GOV.UK, "Disabled Students' Allowance", "Eligibility" and "How to apply": gov.uk
• University of Oregon Accessible Education Center, "Notetaking Supports", "Registration Process & What to Expect" and "Recording Lectures for Technology-Assisted Notetaking": aec.uoregon.edu
• Appalachian State University, Office of Access and Opportunity, "Note-Taking Provisions": ao.appstate.edu
• Kent State University Student Accessibility Services, "Note-Taking Assistance": kent.edu
• University of Kansas Student Access Center, "Note-Taking Accommodations": access.ku.edu
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), "Agreement for Recording of Lectures": sds.umbc.edu