Struggling for Accommodation: Barriers to Accessibility faced by Cognitively Disabled Self-Represented Litigants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Report examines the experiences of cognitively disabled self-represented litigants (SRLs) who have requested accommodations for their cognitive disabilities.\nCognitively disabled SRLs have increasingly reached out to the NSRLP detailing their frustrations with the accessibility of legal proceedings and the barriers they face in requesting accommodations for their disabilities. In response, we have sought to clarify the challenges faced by these individuals in order to make specific recommendations to Canadian Courts. A secondary goal of the study was to begin a preliminary investigation into the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cognitively disabled SRLs’ ability to secure accommodations.\nThe 10 participants were all Canadian adults with cognitive disabilities. We used data collected via semi-structured interviews and qualitative content analysis to determine the nature and extent of the challenges faced by cognitively disabled SRLs while requesting accommodations, and to determine whether the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted these experiences.\nWe found that participants were generally unaware of available resources and the appropriate processes they should follow to request accommodation due to inaccessible or unavailable informational materials. Participants overwhelmingly reported that the Court had made no effort to assist them, and many described how Court employees and judges treated them with hostility and dismissiveness.\nBased on these results, the we have recommended that judges, court services employees, and members of the Bar receive training on the nature of cognitive disabilities and court resources and procedures, and that accommodation policies be better communicated and advertised to SRLs.\nIn addition to this report, participants’ testimonies and the NSRLP’s recommendations were presented to the Ontario Courts Accessibility Committee in June of 2021. Segments of the interviews may be heard in our podcast episode, “Struggling for Accommodation.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".