What does a DSA award cover?

Colin Beesley (DSA Awards Officer): Well DSA awards cover a whole range of types of support and types of equipment. Each award is very specific and tailored to each individual student's particular needs. In general, they're broken up into four different categories.

Jackie Webster (DSA Awards Officer): The first element is the specialist equipment allowance. That can pay for things like specialist software. And often because this specialist software needs a very high specification computer it will also pay for a computer.

Colin Beesley (DSA Awards Officer):The technology available these days is pretty incredible. There's software that will listen to the sound of your voice and produce text for you. There's things known as screen readers, where you kind of pass a magnifying glass over the screen of your computer and it will blow up the text to enable students with a visual impairment to see their screen more clearly.

There's a massive range of ergonomic equipment available for students as well. In lots of circumstanceswe'll send a student off for a separate ergonomic assessment with a specialist equipment provider who will visit their home and measure them up for a bespoke chair and possibly even a bespoke table and provide a solution that enables a student to study for longer comfortably in their home.

Malcolm Dixon (OU Access Centre): This is a highly specialist chair and one of the beauties of it is it allows you to modify a lot of the functions of the chair. This particular seat has a good high backrest and it allows you to support the student with the lumbar support so if I move this lever, it moves the seat forward and that actually produces an upright position which supports the lumbar support in the student and it allows them to have a straight back.

Woman: The chair you supplied me makes sitting to study so much more comfortable. It's also made me feel more independent which feels great.

Jackie Webster (DSA Awards Officer): The second element is a non-medical helper. This could be someone to help you take notes. It could be a British sign language interpreter. It could be a dyslexia tutor. The third element is called General allowance. So if you, because of your disability, have to type your work and then print it out in a very large font, or do it in double line spacing, it means that you're going to use extra ink and extra paper and therefore that's going to cost you more. So this is something that we could cover with a DSA.

Colin Beesley (DSA Awards Officer): And finally we will also often award a travel allowance. So students with disabilities may not be able to use public transport, for whatever reason. In circumstances like that we would make a contribution towards the cost of them getting a taxi, for example, or possibly even taking a specialised mode of transport if that was what was required.

Male: A DSA covers specialist equipment and software, non-medical help, a general allowance and travel costs.