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Finding a good university really is virtually impossible. All of their disability handbooks have been crafted for the benefit of their senior management teams, so they'll pretty much all say more or less the same thing, i.e. "we are here to support any disabled students from all walks of life".

The trick is to find one with the course you want and get in touch directly with their disability director. You'll get a good idea of how support will work. You won't necessarily know what it'll be like, but if they go that extra mile to help you find out what you need to know before you even start, that's usually a good thing. You just have to hope that this lovely helpful director doesn't hop it before you begin, never mind graduate.

Some departments are better than others. Bad as it is, don't be put off too much by the idea that they've had one other student with the same disability as you within the past twenty years. Chances are, they'll all say that. After getting nowhere at Keele, I transferred to Royal Holloway, studying Computer Science. I'm the first blind student they've taught, but I've received excellent support so far. They didn't necessarily know what to do before I told them, but so far they've been willing to listen and take any of my suggestions on board. I'm sure this honeymoon period won't last, but so long as this dialogue continues, it can't go too far wrong...

Here are a few of Daz's top tips.

1. Insist on getting a copy of any reading lists in advance. If you haven't received anything from a university by a time they've agreed with you, badger them!
2. Visit any university before you apply. I went to a couple of official open days, but I found it helpful to organise one just for myself, a few weeks after the general one. You might get a good indication of their support infrastructure if you request accessible copies of any handbooks and the like that will appear in the pack you'll get on any of these open days.
3. Write directly to the university department's secretary and/or admissions team. Tell them of your wish to study on their course and ask them to arrange a meeting with you. Lecturers don't like giving you slides or their notes in advance, so start asking for their help when you have this meeting.
4. It's worth applying to more than one university, but you'll have a hard time doing all this work for six of them! Nevertheless, try and do as much as you can. Don't just do what I did the first time and just assume that all universities are wonderful. Anyway you're being far more organised than I was, so don't worry.
5. This one really is impossible, but try and get your DSA needs assessment done as soon as possible. Be aware that your assessor also has to act on behalf of those responsible for funding your support, so they will do all they can to cut costs. If you can, have an idea of what you'll need before your assessment, so you can bully your assessor into providing what you need and not just what they want to pay for.
6. Universities are usually pretty good at organising note-takers or readers. Very few will have heard of scanners, never mind know how to use them. If you can, try and attend an introductory lecture on the subject you are going to study. Don't worry about taking in any of it. Instead, use it to get an idea of whether or not you'll actually need a note-taker. Laptops are ok, but you might find that a specialist note-taking device is more suitable. Sadly, you probably won't be able to claim both on your DSA, but it's worth a try.
7. Good luck and don't panic!

wow thanks for the survival tips!

My own college-search days were back in the stonge age (late 80s) and in a different country (US, not UK). But I guess a good college search is the same in any context, because my strategies were roughly similar to those Darren recommends above.

I started with this:

1. I looked through listings of colleges/universities, including in guidebooks. (In the US, colleges/universities are roughly the same except that a "college" is focused on undergraduate programs, a university has more post-graduate programs. A "college" is NOT a secondary school program in the US, it's TERITARY program. I'm emphasizing this since that seems to be a common point of confusion among international audiences--understandably, since we seem to be pretty much the only folk on the face of the Earth who define "college" that way!)

I figured out what criteria I was looking for as just a student--not a disabled student, but just a student (e.g., competitive, had coursework in X, Y, Z, etc) and narrowed these down to a few dozen choices or so.

2. I figured out what other information I needed, partly as just a student ("tell me more about X major") and partly as a deaf person ("tell me about your disability services program, esp for deaf students") and wrote letters to all the colleges who made my first cut. For disability-related stuff, I made clear exactly what kinds of services I would need (sign language interpreter, note taker etc)

In this day and age, I would probably have replaced step number 2 with digging up the information myself on the web, probably first looking at course work etc. And then I would have narrowed things down further from there. But of course, the web didn't exist back then.

I then visited about a dozen colleges in all. At each college/university, I made a point of talking with disability student services--specifically, where possible, with the person responsible for deaf student services. Obviously in your case, you'd be talking with whomever has the most experience with visual impairments, if anyone.

What you find will likely depend partly on the size of the school: for a small program, there might only be one person running the entire disability student services department, for students with ALL disabilities--and that person might also have other, unrelated responsibilities. At larger schools, there may be an entire office devoted to disabled students, and some of the staff within the department may even specialize for certain types of disbilities or services. At least, that's how it is in the US. If you really have your heart set on NOT being the "guinea pig blind student" at your school, then you just MIGHT be lucky if you look hard enough and are flexible enough in other criteria. I did find University of California at Berkeley which had about 10 or 15 deaf students at that time. But this is very rare, even for really large schools. You might have to at least settle for a school where the people seem to understand that YOU are the best expert on your needs, rather than painting their own assumptions over you based on what "that other visually impaired student" needed or didn't need. (Yah, I ran into similar attitudes in my college search--for instance, the school where they basically asked when I was going to "out grow" my "dependence" on sign language and learn to just speak and lipread like the other deaf students they had had. Urrggghhh.)

As Darren says, the only REAL way to find out what a college is really like, ESPECIALLY for disabled students, is to VISIT IN PERSON. Ask for whatever accommodations you'll need during the visit too, including if you drop by classes (which I recommend as part of your visit). This would be a good "test drive" of their disability services. In my case, I asked for a sign language interpreter (not for note takers, though) to accompany me during interviews and class visits while on campus. In one case, I rejected a school when it turned out that their idea of an appropriate "interpreter" was a hard of hearing woman who seemed in desperate need of an interpreter herself half the time, and could only barely sign--which made her resulting interpretation near incomprehensible and completely useless. In another case, a school that had initially said with full confidence that they could meet all my needs all of a sudden said, "Duh, an interpreter for your campus visit? Durrh, we have no clue how to get one so we can't do that." We (parents and I) ended up canceling NON-REFUNDABLE plane tickets to Colorado (Mid Western/central USA) because of it. My parents were really pissed (at the school, of course, not me). So even just SCHEDULING campus visits can be REALLY ENLIGHTENING (though, unfortunately, not always in a good way).

DO bear in mind that you (presumably) do have some legal protections if you should happen to discover a school that you are absolutely, positively dying to attend (let's say, it is the ONLY school--or at least the best qualified school--that teaches the particular course of study that you want). If necessary, you could push and fight for your legal rights to appropriate accommodations. Doing so could help not only you but all future students in your situation.

But that can be a tough decision to make: for me, way back when, my philosphy was, I was continuing my education in order to STUDY and LEARN and prepare myself for a better job. I wasn't there to get distracted by a legal battle, and I certainly wasn't exactly enamored of the idea of maybe having to struggle along without adequate services until (or if) I won. That's why I made "Must be a deaf-friendly school" one of my top criteria when I was deciding where to go.

If it were today, though--now that my professional and educational goals are more specialized than they were back then, and the options correspondingly far fewer--I might be more willing to fight if there was something I absolutely had to have. Fortunately, that has not yet become necessary.

Oh--and, as for a person being traumatized by actually MEETING A DISABLED PERSON--yah, been there, done that. The most notorious example was a substitute teacher I had one day in high school. (Which you'll recall from my post above was in the stonge age ;-) ) My Mom didn't believe me--she thought he must have been nervous just because he was a substitute and new to that classroom. But a few days later, we were talking in class about how people respond to disability and just about all the other HEARING students were in complete agreement that the sub teacher had been terrified specifically of me. Some of them said they wished they could have talked to him about it to get him to understand that me being deaf just isn't a big deal.

*sigh*

I'm autistic and epilptic rather than physically disabled, but I found that most of the unis I looked at dealt with me pretty well (I'm in my first year of a film studies course). I picked Oxford Brookes for it's disabilites support, which is pretty awesome, but I think I would have been just as well supported anywhere else (I visited four out of my six unis, and managed to see the disability advisor in three of those).

Make sure you get in contact with the disabilities advisor before you go to any more open days, and try and arrange a meeting with them. There should be an email/phone number on the uni website. They tend to actually know what they're talking about, unlike everyone else in the uni. I think most unis have someone specifically to help certain disabilites as well - I have a guy who deals with all the autistics here that I have to see twice a week.

The DSA is great, I got a mac laptop out of it which I love. Mum and I started to sort that out in january though, so you really need to be on the ball for that. I know other people who didn't get what they needed until a month into term!

Oh, and, I have a disabled room. It's amazing, I'm never going to have a room this big again. Some bright spark decided to build a wheelchair access room on the first floor where there's no lift, so I got it.

Having two visually impaired adults (23 and 21) at different universities it is very much down to how you view their ability to support you and getting the appropriate disabled students allowance grant with the accompanying assessment if necessary. Make full use of the assessment and see as many universities and talk to as many of the support teams as possible. My son goes to one in the West Midlands close to Manchester and my daughter goes to one in the North East. They both reckon their Universities give good support

Hi Jemma

Have you tried brunel? www.brunel.ac.uk

They have a really good disability service. Worth a look, I think, but only if they have your course! Remember- you're not a 'disabled student,' you're a student with a disability.