The Student Government Association voted unanimously to allocate funding to buy themselves three new laptops.

The Student Senate voted to approve the allocation of $2,658.74 to pay for the laptops. The money comes from the SGA office expenditures budget.

One of the three laptops will be used to aid the university’s effort to do a better job of complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), following a 2016 civil rights complaint filed by Emily Schlenker, a blind pre-med student.

“Within office expenditure funds, we have a line item for technological updates that they put in last year just because they knew that the next session was most likely going to try to become ADA-compliant,” Student Body Vice President Shelby Rowell said. “They left $10,000 in that fund.”

Aside from the laptops, $698 have been spent from the tech fund on the purchase of a camera and video kit for the purpose of livestreaming Student Senate meetings, Rowell said.

Rowell said that SGA hopes to begin livestreaming all Student Senate meetings by the end of the semester. The laptop and camera combination would allow for a split-screen streaming of the meetings, to broadcast the meeting from different angles and show the PowerPoint presentations on the stream. ADA-compliance accommodations for the hearing-impaired would have to include closed-captioning on the livestream.

One of the laptops will be available for student senators to borrow. The second laptop will be used for livestreaming the meetings. The third laptop will be used to connect to a projector for presentations during meetings, Rowell said. Currently, SGA borrows a laptop from Student Involvement for that purpose, Rowell said.

The laptops will be purchased from Dell due to a contract WSU has with the company, said SGA co-adviser Gabriel Fonseca.

“The funds we have are technically state dollars, so we have to use whatever contract the university has,” Fonseca said.

Editor’s note: The print version of this story stated that SGA hoped to begin livestreaming by the end of September. Rowell said the end of September was the original goal, but researching and ordering cameras changed the timeline for livestreaming.