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Sprint to Inclusion: Embedding Accessibility Sprint in a Software Engineering Course
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The need to better understand how to support and provide accessibility has increased dramatically in recent years, whether in industry or education. Higher education institutions have an essential role in raising awareness of how important accessibility is and, at the same time, can provide students with examples of good practice in building inclusive experiences. This work aims to assess the state of the art of accessibility in Switzerland, from teaching to administrative staff. Our findings show that the majority (77%) do not teach accessibility because it is not a core part of their courses and 21% declared to don't know enough to teach. 62,5% of who is teaching accessibility teach to evaluate web pages accessibility standards and heuristics and half of them help understanding technology barriers faced by people with disabilities. Likewise, our administrative staff respondents had four times more guidelines to deal with physical access than with technology enhancements. We also found out that with the COVID-19 outbreak, our instructors mainly used extra software and were more available online.
This paper presents a unique approach to undergraduate teaching in which accessibility topics are completely integrated throughout the curriculum, treating accessibility not as a separate topic, but rather as an integral part of design and development. Means of accomplishing this integration throughout the entire four-year curriculum are presented. We also describe how our expertise in accessible design has extended beyond the education of computer science and engineering students to include Web content authors across campus.
The paper reports on the design and evaluation of a 10 credit module that has been designed and taught for the first to 35 full time Computer science and software engineering Masters students
An increasing importance of accessibility awareness and knowledge emanates from a moral imperative and as an employment differentiator. It is important that educational programs have a demonstrated ability to teach these skills. In this paper, we focus on the role that educational courses can play in increasing accessibility awareness for undergraduate students. We review literature indicating that a number of accessibility teaching interventions have been reported; yet the evaluation of their effectiveness has not been conducted in a consistent manner. We report on our 3-semester evaluation of undergraduate students' accessibility awareness and knowledge following a week of accessibility lectures as part of courses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where a subset of students also interact with stakeholders with disabilities during the conduct of the course projects. Gains in awareness and knowledge occur when accessibility lectures were part of the course. These gains are compared across the teams who interacted with a person with a disability and teams with no such interaction. In addition, we provide the test battery developed to measure these skills, to enable other researchers to conduct evaluations of the effectiveness of interventions for teaching inclusive thinking in undergraduate computing at their own institutions.
Industry demand for software developers with knowledge of accessibility has increased substantially in recent years. However, there is little knowledge about the prevalence of higher education teaching about accessibility or faculty's perceived barriers to teaching accessibility. To address this gap, we surveyed 14,176 computing and information science faculty in the United States. We received a representative sample of at least one response from 318 of the 352 institutions we surveyed, totaling 1,857 responses. We found that 175 institutions (50%) had at least one instructor teaching accessibility and that no fewer than 2.5% of faculty overall teach accessibility. Faculty that teach accessibility are twice as likely to be female, to have expertise in HCI and software engineering, and to know people with disabilities. The most critical barriers to teaching accessibility that faculty reported were the absence of clear and discipline-specific accessibility learning objectives and the lack of faculty knowledge about accessibility. Faculty desired resources that were specific to the areas of computing in which they teach rather than general accessibility resources and guidelines.
With the increasing importance of accessibility awareness and knowledge as both a moral imperative and an employment differentiator, it is incumbent on educational programs to have demonstrated ability to teach these skills. We report on our year-long evaluation of university students' accessibility awareness and knowledge following a week of accessibility lectures as part of courses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We report gains in awareness and knowledge when accessibility lectures were part of the course. We describe the test battery developed to measure these skills, and describe our ongoing longitudinal research to measure the effectiveness of several interventions for teaching inclusive thinking in undergraduate computing courses.
Ensuring that software systems are accessible to users with disabilities is historically neglected but increasingly important for professional software developers. It is imperative that students are familiar with accessible practices to support this often-overlooked form of diversity. We suggest that including accessibility topics when teaching user-interface development skills is a low-effort task that can directly support teaching core software development principles such as "separation of concerns" and "standards compliance." In this lightning talk we describe our initial efforts to integrate accessibility and accessible design as "first-class" topics into our department's required course on web development, including specific examples of concepts covered, classroom activities, and assignments. We also discuss suggestions for how to potentially integrate accessibility topics into other computer science courses which include any kinds of front-end user interfaces. The goal of this talk is to promote awareness of accessibility concerns, demonstrate the ease by which educators can include such material, and encourage discussion about how to engage students in such diversity considerations throughout the curriculum.
This paper identifies some of the challenges of teaching and learning accessibility through the lens of pedagogy (which deals with the theory and practice of education). We argue that accessibility education in computing science presents a set of unique and challenging characteristics for those engaged in accessibility capacity building. Significant moves are being made to embed accessibility within academic curricula and professional domains. However, through a qualitative thematic review of the accessibility pedagogic literature, we find that the field lacks the pedagogic culture necessary to support widespread excellence in teaching and learning. Nonetheless, our review identifies aspects of this small but important literature that indicate how a pedagogic culture for accessibility can be stimulated through research, debate and discussion, to promote a more pedagogically-grounded approach to the field as a whole.
This paper proposes an accessibility first pedogogy for web design, in which the course is organized around the requirement of implementing web pages accessible to visually impaired computer users. This approach and its advantages are discussed in detail.
Web accessibility is a fundamental instrument to support the shift towards an inclusive cyberspace and a socially responsible society, and higher education plays an essential role in this effort. This paper fills the gap of lacking literature by reporting an undergraduate Web design course that adopts a holistic and pragmatic approach to teaching Web accessibility and presenting the specific accessibility topics and techniques that are appropriate for the course scope and its assessment strategies. It is hoped that the instructional approach presented in the paper will prove beneficial to instructors facing similar demands and challenges in computing programs.
Developing accessible Websites is essential to enable disabled people to have access to content and day-to-day services. As stated by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, "access to the Web by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect". This paper presents a summary of a short course on techniques to help design more accessible Web and multimedia content for people with different types of disabilities, presented at the 19th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and The Web. The course included examples from educational contexts, including issues with text, images, audio, video, structural elements and navigation, discussing how different accessibility issues may affect users with different types of disabilities.
This paper reports on a General Education course called "Universal Access: Disability, Technology and Society" that enables students from all majors to learn more about disability and the issues that surround it, as well as how Assistive Technology facilitates effective participation of those with disabilities in society. Guest lectures, meant to give the students different perspectives on disability, are integral part of the course. Guest lecturers include experts in disability studies, professionals working with people with disabilities, and persons with disability. To gain practical knowledge, the students carry out group projects or volunteering activities that involves people with disabilities. Since its first introduction in 2006, the course had always filled to capacity. A survey with 75 students conducted in Winter 2010 revealed that students felt that their knowledge about universal access and disabilities had improved significantly, and that they had become aware of accessibility in everyday life.
Research results concerning Assistive Technologies show a growing demand of experts on AT deriving from an increase in use
of Assistive Technologies which can be seen as an indirect result of worldwide population development trends. According to
these recent changes efforts on inclusion of people with disabilities and older adults is of prime importance. Due to these
facts the Institute Integriert Studieren started developing a new university course on Assistive Technologies. The characteristics
are the composition of the course and its interdisciplinary content. Graduates will be awarded with an academic title. The
following article describes the idea of the training, its contents, its realisation and its expected impacts.
Undergraduate software engineering courses aim to prepare students to deliver software in a variety of domains. The manner in which these courses are conducted varies, though team projects with real or imaginary stakeholders are common. While the key course concepts vary from the entire lifecycle to specific aspects of design, concepts like accessibility are rare. This paper will present a study of team projects in a requirements engineering course. One group of students conducted projects with accessibility requirements while another group of students delivered projects without accessibility requirements. The course content was the same, including discussion of accessibility. To support the understanding of accessibility, stakeholders with disabilities were included in the requirements engineering process. Both teams benefited from the experience as indirect knowledge acquisition occurred. Students from a previous offering of the course, with no external stakeholder interaction, demonstrated lower levels of accessibility understanding.
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
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Accessibility in Introductory Computer Science
- Robert F Cohen
- Alexander V Fairley
- David Gerry
- Gustavo R Lima
Robert F. Cohen, Alexander V. Fairley, David Gerry, and Gustavo R. Lima. 2005.
Accessibility in Introductory Computer Science. In Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE
Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '05). ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 17-21. https://doi.org/10.1145/1047344.1047367
Making Facebook.Com Accessible to as Many People as Possible
- Tatiana Iskandar
- Dominic Gannaway
- Ankit Sardesai
- Jonathan Yung
Tatiana Iskandar, Dominic Gannaway, Ankit Sardesai, and Jonathan Yung. 2020.
Making Facebook.Com Accessible to as Many People as Possible. https://
engineering.fb.com/2020/07/30/web/facebook-com-accessibility/