Every exam period, the accessibility service sends its accommodation letters and teachers build their exams. In a classroom, the two meet without much effort: the student with extra time stays after the others leave, and the student who uses a screen reader writes in the adapted exam room. In a proctored online exam, the accommodation has to travel through software, and that is where it often gets lost.
It shows up in small, stressful ways. A screen reader goes silent the moment the lockdown starts. The timer ends at the same minute as everyone else's. A student who stepped away for an authorized break finds an incident on the report. This guide is for accessibility advisors (the services adaptés in Quebec cégeps), teachers and continuing-education coordinators who want accommodations to survive remote and hybrid exams intact.
Which accommodations come up in proctored exams?
The measures themselves are familiar. What changes online is who applies them, and when.
- Extra time. A third more time is common practice; some students are entitled to more.
- Breaks. Authorized pauses for a medical condition, fatigue or concentration.
- A quiet or separate room. Fewer distractions, sometimes a room of one's own with its own supervision.
- Assistive technology. Screen readers, text-to-speech, word prediction and writing-support software such as spelling and grammar checkers.
- Special conditions. Other measures the accessibility service sets case by case.
Remote and hybrid exams make these measures harder to deliver, not less necessary. A continuing-education student writing from home, a student far from campus or a hybrid course with an online mid-term all depend on the proctoring tool to provide what an exam room and an in-person proctor used to. And in a large course, several students in the same exam often have different accommodations.
Why do proctoring tools break accommodations?
Most proctoring setups are designed around a standard exam: one duration, one set of rules, one lockdown for everyone. Accommodations are exceptions to that standard, and they usually live outside the tool, in a letter, a spreadsheet or an email to the teacher. Five failure points come up again and again.
- The lockdown blocks the assistive technology. A lockdown that closes every unlisted application closes the screen reader, the text-to-speech tool and the writing aid along with the chat apps.
- One timer for everyone. The exam has a single duration, and the student's extra time sits in a document the tool never reads.
- Breaks look like incidents. A student who leaves the camera's view or the exam window can trigger a detection, and nothing on the report says the break was authorized.
- Accommodations are re-entered by hand for each exam. Every quiz, every make-up exam and every substitute teacher is one more chance to forget.
- The interface itself isn't accessible. If the sign-in, the pre-check or the exam instructions can't be reached with a keyboard or read by a screen reader, the accommodation fails before the exam even starts.
What does a lost accommodation cost?
- For the student. An exam written without the time or the tool they are entitled to no longer measures what they know. Discovering the problem in the first minutes adds stress, and a flagged break can lead to questions they did nothing to deserve.
- For the accessibility service. Advisors chase teachers before every exam, organize make-up sessions after the fact and handle complaints, during weeks that are already their busiest.
- For the teacher. Overrides to set exam by exam, exceptions to track, retakes to schedule.
- For the institution. Quebec's Charter of human rights and freedoms lists both a handicap and "the use of any means to palliate a handicap" among prohibited grounds of discrimination, and institutions have a duty to accommodate students with disabilities. Similar obligations exist elsewhere in Canada and in the United States. How they apply to a given exam is a question for your accessibility service and legal counsel; a tool that silently removes an accommodation shifts that risk onto the institution.
What doesn't work
Each of these workarounds solves part of the problem and creates another.
- Retyping accommodations into each exam. Moodle's quiz settings, for example, let a teacher add a user override with a longer time limit for one student. That works for one quiz. Across a term of quizzes, make-up exams and teachers, something gets missed, and an override that lengthens the time limit without moving the closing time can still cut the attempt short.
- Exempting accommodated students from proctoring. It removes the technical problem by creating a second, less supervised path. That is unfair to the rest of the class, and it can cast doubt on the accommodated student's result.
- Sending every accommodated student to the campus testing center. It works on campus, but not for remote and continuing-education students, and the center fills up during final-exam weeks.
- Opening the lockdown for the whole class. Permitting a writing aid or a browser for everyone so that one student can use it weakens the exam for all.
- Counting on automated flags being reviewed later. Tools that analyze behavior automatically can treat looking away, unusual movements or speech as suspicious, so a student who uses text-to-speech can be flagged for the very thing their accommodation allows. A human review step helps, but the student carries the flag until someone clears it. The alternative is laid out in remote proctoring without facial recognition.
Lockdown browsers such as Safe Exam Browser, which is free and open source, can be configured to permit specific applications. The mechanism is sound; the open question is who maintains that list, for which student, and for each exam.
How to protect accommodations in a proctored exam
These steps apply whatever tool you use. They give each party one job: the accessibility service decides, the tool applies, the proctor adjusts, and a person reviews.
1. Keep one accommodation profile per student
The accessibility service owns it, based on the student's approved measures, and the proctoring tool applies it to every exam automatically. Teachers can see what applies to their students but don't retype it. When a new accommodation is approved mid-term, it is updated once, in one place.
2. Permit assistive technology by name, for that student
Add the student's screen reader, text-to-speech tool or writing aid to the lockdown's permitted list for that student only. Everything else stays blocked, including AI tools. Exceptions should be specific and visible, never a blanket "allow all applications".
3. Extend time and breaks in the session itself
Extra time should change the student's own timer and the exam's closing time, not just a duration field. Breaks belong inside the session, so the clock and the incident log both know about them. A proctor should also be able to add time during the exam when a technical problem eats into it.
4. Test the assistive technology in the pre-check
Ask students to run the pre-check a day or two ahead with their assistive technology open, in the same lockdown as the real exam. If the screen reader doesn't speak under the lockdown, you want to know on a Tuesday afternoon, not ten minutes into the final.
5. Make reviewers aware of accommodations
Whoever reviews incidents should see the student's accommodations next to the timeline. A gap during an authorized break, or synthetic speech on the audio track, is expected rather than suspicious. No decision or sanction should follow automatically from a detection.
6. Ask for WCAG 2.1 level AA
The student-facing screens (sign-in, pre-check, instructions, exam window) should be designed to WCAG 2.1 level AA: keyboard navigation, labels a screen reader can read, sufficient contrast. Ask the vendor how conformance was assessed, then try it yourself with a screen reader.
Checklist: what to require from the tool
| Accommodation | What can go wrong | What to require from the tool |
|---|---|---|
| Extra time | One timer for everyone; the exam closes before the extended time runs out | Per-student time applied to the session and the closing time; live extensions by the proctor |
| Breaks | Leaving the camera's view is logged as an incident; the clock keeps running | Breaks built into the student's session; reviewers see that they were authorized |
| Quiet or separate room | An extra proctor for one student, or no supervision at all | Supervision that covers any room or home, under the same rules as everyone else |
| Screen reader | The lockdown closes it; the tool's screens have no labels | The screen reader permitted for that student; a WCAG 2.1 AA interface |
| Text-to-speech | Blocked as an unauthorized application; speech on the audio flagged | Permitted per student; reviewers know that speech is expected |
| Word prediction, writing support | Blocked, or allowed for the whole class | Permitted for the students who are entitled to it, and no one else |
| The profile itself | Retyped for each exam; forgotten by a substitute teacher | One profile per student, applied to every exam |
How Examo handles it
Examo sets accommodations per student: extra time, breaks, special conditions and authorized tools. Authorized tools include assistive technologies such as screen readers, text-to-speech and writing-support software, and the exam lockdown does not block them. Everything that is not permitted stays blocked: unauthorized websites, applications, browser extensions and AI tools. The accessibility and accommodations page shows what each accommodation does.
Accommodations are applied with the exam's security profile when the exam is set up, one of the six steps described in how Examo works. During the exam, the proctor can extend an individual student's time, and the exam's access window and buffer period absorb the unexpected. If the connection drops, the exam and the recording continue on the student's computer and synchronize automatically when it returns; the student can resume where they were.
Before the exam, a pre-check confirms each student's camera, microphone, connection and identity; asking students with assistive technology to run it with their tools open catches problems early. Every detection is timestamped and submitted to human review, with no suspicion score and no automatic decision or sanction. Examo contains no facial recognition and no automated behavior analysis, so no algorithm judges how a student moves or speaks. How the lockdown and the detections work is detailed on the proctoring page.
The interface is designed to WCAG 2.1 level AA, and the interface, instructions, documentation and support are available in French and English. Examo is a native Windows and macOS application that runs on personal computers or managed workstations, without administrator rights. If your exams are Moodle quizzes, see how to proctor a Moodle quiz remotely, and point students to the students page so they know what to expect.
Key takeaways
- Keep one accommodation profile per student, owned by the accessibility service, and apply it to every exam instead of retyping it exam by exam.
- Permit each student's assistive technology by name in the lockdown, for that student only, rather than opening the exam to every application.
- Extend time in the exam session itself, closing time included, and build authorized breaks into the session so they never read as incidents.
- Have students run the pre-check with their assistive technology open, and show reviewers each student's accommodations next to the incident timeline.
- Require a student interface designed to WCAG 2.1 level AA, and test it yourself with a screen reader before you commit.
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Book a demoFrequently asked questions
What accommodations do students get in online exams?
The most common are extra time (a third more is common practice), authorized breaks, a quiet or separate room, and assistive technology such as screen readers, text-to-speech, word prediction and writing-support software. The accessibility service decides each student's measures. In a proctored online exam, every one of them has to be carried into the exam session and through the lockdown, or it is lost.
Can students use a screen reader during a proctored online exam?
They should be able to, when the accessibility service has authorized it. A lockdown that blocks every unlisted application also blocks a screen reader or a text-to-speech tool, so the tool must be permitted by name for that student. Have the student test it in a pre-check before exam day, and confirm that the proctoring software's own screens work with a screen reader.
How do you give extra time in a proctored online exam?
Attach the extra time to the student rather than to one exam, so it is never forgotten. Then check two things: the timer in the student's session reflects the longer duration, and the exam's closing time moves too, otherwise the attempt can end when the window closes. A proctor should also be able to add time during the exam after a technical problem.
Will proctoring software flag an authorized break as cheating?
It can. A student who leaves the camera's view or the exam window during a break may trigger an event in tools that detect absence or loss of focus. The safeguards are to build breaks into the student's session and to have a person who knows the student's accommodations review every flag before anything is decided. No sanction should follow automatically from a detection.
How does Examo handle exam accommodations?
Examo sets accommodations per student: extra time, breaks, special conditions and authorized tools, including assistive technologies such as screen readers, text-to-speech and writing-support software, which the lockdown does not block. Proctors can extend a student's time during the exam, every incident goes to human review, and the interface is designed to WCAG 2.1 level AA, in French and English.