When Brandon Soliday of Port Orchard passed the driving knowledge exam on Nov. 3 in Lakewood, the 21-year-old clenched his fist and raised his arms to the air to express his happiness. With a big smile on his face, he gave his mother, Elizabeth a high five. Leaving the exam location, they called his father immediately to share the good news.

It was a huge success for Soliday who has autism, a receptive expressive speech disability and an auditory processing disability, as Elizabeth described. Soliday had taken the exam and failed 16 times in four years before his 17th attempt in November.

The difference this time was that the Washington State Department of Licensing (WADOL) provided an accommodation that allowed Soliday to demonstrate his driving knowledge. And many in the department who helped in this journey were glad to see the result, as it may now open the door for other individuals with specific needs like Soliday.

“We’re excited about this,” Dan Cooke, Administrator of the Licensing, Endorsements, and Traffic Safety Program at WADOL told Kitsap Sun. “We love the fact that we’ve been able to support a customer to deliver a service and maintain the integrity of our licensing process…It’s an amazing success.”

“I feel really happy that they finally helped us out,” Elizabeth said. “I feel it was the right thing to do.”

Equal accommodation for a customer with autism

Soliday now does janitorial work at the Naval Base Bangor. He has been driving with a learner permit and accompanied by his mother since 2019.

Elizabeth first noticed Brandon’s ability to learn rules and actions based on observing other behavior in 2018. That year, she was surprised to see that Brandon seemed to know how to play Special Olympics softball the first time he played the sport. She realized that her son had an ability to watch someone do something and then picking up the know-how, Elizabeth said, rather than having it explained verbally.

So, when Brandon expressed his interest in driving at age 17, Elizabeth took him to a nearby parking lot to start an unexpected journey.

“He wanted more independence. He wants to go to the grocery store and maybe get a snack and come back on his own, or maybe he wants to go to the park,” Elizabeth said.

Soliday took driver’s ed courses at two driving schools and applied for and renewed his permit over the past four years. The permit allows people to legally practice driving on Washington roads with a licensed driver who has at least 5 years of driving experience, according to DOL.

“He has never gotten an accident and never gotten a ticket. And he really wants to practice a lot. So, whenever I go out, he’s driving unless he just doesn’t want to,” Elizabeth said.

‘He tried for a long, long time.’

Unfortunately, when it came to the driving knowledge test, Soliday had a hard time understanding the description of the questions in DOL’s exams. Some words that appeared on the test sheet, such as “hydroplaning” or “inattentional blindness,” are not common in everyday conversation. The inconsistent writing style of the questions also confused him, Elizabeth said.

Soliday began reading at 13 years old, which put him far behind his peers in developing his reading skills, she said, and led to frustration with DOL questions.

“He tried for a long, long time. He did so much studying. And at one point, it was earlier this year, I actually had to take the book away and say, we’re not doing this anymore. You’re getting too frustrated,” Elizabeth said.

After Elizabeth’s request for an accommodation to test, the Department of Licensing came up with a way to reconstruct the exam in a way that measured the knowledge needed, but based on Brandon’s situation.

He took the exam over two days, with 20 multiple-choice questions given per day and 40 questions in total. The questions were rewritten to be straight-forward and at a third to fifth-grade reading level. Images that reflected the content of the questions were prepared for each question. Also, the questions were grouped by topic, instead of jumping from one concept to another.

A DOL employee read the questions for Soliday in the exam room. One question was read and shown to him at a time. Soliday could either say the answer or point it on the exam paper.

“When the questions were presented to him, he knew that,” Angela Berg, a Curriculum and Testing Specialist at WSDOL who oversaw Soliday’s test, recalled. “There was some that he paused and thought about, but there’s a lot of more he was just going really fast.”

“He knew this information. He had this knowledge. He just needed an avenue to communicate that,” Berg said.

Soliday’s test was WSDOL’s first experience in offering accommodations to a person with autism, and this process will help the department in creating a better test for everybody who takes the knowledge test in the future, Berg said.

Part of DOL’s efforts to offer customer-centric services

The accommodation created for Soliday is just one of the many strategies that the department is taking to provide customer-centric service for driving and traffic safety, Cooke added.

DOL is currently modernizing the Washington State Driver Guide to make the guide more accessible to a more diverse population in terms of languages and accessibility standards under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Such modernization includes creating a user-friendly interactive document that allows more individuals to engage with the material in ways that are meaningful to them, Cooke said.

The department is also taking the same approach to revise its curriculum standards for driver education schools in the state, Cooke said.

“It’s about a holistic approach to driver education and safety that is customer-centric and service-oriented, where we’re looking at how we can help every Washington resident achieve this goal of being a safe road user with a driver’s license that has every opportunity to succeed.”

Encouragement for other families to reach out

For parents who have children with autism and may face similar challenges, Cooke encouraged people to reach out to the department and help DOL understand the situation. The department works with statewide stakeholders and partners who focus on public and traffic safety and often can tap into resources that parents may not be aware of, Cooke said.

“There may be solutions out there already,” Cooke said. “Or, in this case, we can work with this statewide team of people to develop solutions like this one that have the potential to be the foundation for future efforts.”

Soliday will still need to take and pass his driving test before receiving his driver’s license, Elizabeth said. But when he could drive on his own, they prepared to put a paper in the visor of his car that clearly stated Brandon’s disability along with his insurance information and car registration so he could take out these documents quickly in case he was stopped by a police.

Passing the knowledge test was a step on Soliday’s road to becoming more independent, Elizabeth said.

“Brandon’s got big goals,” Elizabeth said. “He has realistic goals…Brandon really wants to be an independent adult, as independent as he can. He realizes that he needs our support, but he just wants to prove himself.”

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Man with autism earns drivers license with Washington state equity plan