Narrator: Teaching Accessibility: Including Accessibility in Your Courses
Narrator: Technology companies want their products to appeal to a wide audience
including people with disabilities.
These companies need designers and engineers who have the knowledge and skills
to develop products for all users.
Richard: I'm Richard Ladner, professor in computer science and engineering
at the University of Washington.
Any course where the thing you're doing
is designing or building software that people are going to use,
you should consider the widest variety of people that are possibly going to use it.
Does the person who's going to use it have a disability?
And if so, does your software actually work for them
or is it disabling?
Narrator: Products that are accessibly designed
can also help users who experience situational disabilities.
Richard: Even people without a disability can be temporarily impaired.
If you're in a noisy environment you might like to have captions.
Or if you're in a bar or sports bar, something like that, and everybody's cheering
and you want to see what the announcers are saying,
well you can read it.
Narrator: As the population ages,
other users may have decreased dexterity, vision, or hearing.
Matt: My name is Matt May.
I am the senior program manager for accessibility at Adobe.
Thirty years from now I'm going to expect the same access
to materials as I have today with the faculties that I have today.
So when we talk about the aging user
we have to be talking about ourselves in 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
Narrator: Richard Ladner and Matt May
have teamed up to give presentations to computing faculty
about teaching accessibility in their courses.
Richard: There are one billion people in the world–
that's one-seventh of the world’s population–
have a disability
and companies like Facebook want customers
and they want to make sure what they're offering
is really accessible to everyone.
Matt: The reason that we're expecting some kind of accessibility knowledge for this
is that it impacts everything that we do.
It impacts every aspect of our business
and so we need to have people with the skills
to be able to work on this stuff out of the gate.
Richard: Facebook, this is for a front end engineer,
wants HTML/CSS experience including concepts like
layout, specificity, cross browser compatibility
and accessibility.
And that's a requirement for that particular job at Facebook.
Now are your students – if they apply to Facebook -
do they have this knowledge?
Andrew: My name is Andrew Ko and I'm an associate professor
at the Information School at the University of Washington.
One of the things that we've done recently
is run a national survey across the United States
of computer science and information science faculty
and we reached out to several thousand faculty
across the nation and found that most of them are actually very eager
to teach accessibility, but they don't know how it fits in with computing
and they don't know how it fits in with the specific classes that they teach.
So that's one of the problems we want to solve
is to try to find those links between knowledge about accessibility
that we want software developers and software engineers to have
and where it fits in with the specific classes that faculty are teaching.
And then the challenge is getting those faculty to know that knowledge
and then finding ways for them to teach it to students in those classes.
Shiri: My name is Shiri Azenkot.
I am an assistant professor at Cornell Tech.
I have a disability myself and it's what I do research in
so it's a huge part of my life.
And I think it's really important to think about how we teach accessibility
and to share different models of teaching and best practices.
Because right now there's a huge problem with the way technology is designed.
And I think it all starts from the fact that
people who end up in technology-related fields
tend to be a very homogenous group.
So the technology that they design, their output, tends to be
designed and targeted towards a similarly homogenous group.
I try to integrate accessibility or ability,
as I like to think of it, more generally
throughout the content of those courses.
I think it's really important for us to have an ongoing discussion
about our users who we’re designing the technology for
and what assumptions we’re making about their abilities
and also to consider just a diversity of users.
When I say a diversity of users, I'm not only talking about
this able-bodied versus disabled user binary
that a lot of times we think about when we talk about accessibility,
but also about users of different ages,
users that might have different abilities in different contexts.
So for example, maybe you're walking
and so your ability to look down at your phone is hindered.
Maybe you're older and so your eyesight isn't as good anymore.
You need your reading glasses
but you don't want to have to pull them out every time you look at your smartwatch.
Richard: It should be taught in all the courses that are
development or design courses for human facing software.
And that's a lot of our courses.
I taught a lecture in a computer vision class about how to make images accessible.
Because computer vision is understanding images.
And how would you make an image understandable to somebody who's blind?
That's a conversion of a visual image to a tactile image,
so I did a whole lecture on that.
J. Michael: My name is J. Michael Moore
and I am an instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M University.
One thing I did this semester is I contacted our disability services office.
I had them come in and demonstrate some technologies
and in this case it turned out to be
more assistive technologies for people with visual impairments
but it was really good
having the students see the kind of struggles they had
and see the kind of technologies they use.
Then I followed that up by doing, talking about universal design.
Is the information there visibly available?
Is it auditorially available?
Is it tactilely available?
Those are the types of things that I think allow you to start being accessible
without trying to focus on and thinking,
“Oh my gosh, what if the person has this or that or that?”
It becomes more about the delivery and the mode of delivery
and less about the various types of disabilities
or sensory impairments that can be involved in that process.
Andrew: Accessibility really is
at the heart of one of the values of our Information School.
So when I came to the faculty and said,
“I'd like to teach about accessibility in our curriculum.
Where do we think it fits?”
All of them pointed to one of our foundational courses
that we teach to our informatics students.
It's called Intellectual Foundations of Informatics.
And so I worked with those faculty and we talked about how it might fit there.
We also decided that in our introductory web development course,
web accessibility is such a dominant part of access technology
with screen readers and web accessibility standards being really prevalent,
that we decided that it would be a really important part of that course too.
So I sat down with each of the instructors for those two different courses
and we worked on where accessibility topics might be integrated
and how they might not only just be added to the course
but really sort of integrated into the substance of what was being taught.
One of the first things that students learn in our web development class
is about HTML and HTML tags.
And why not teach HTML through an accessibility lens
rather than just teaching HTML in general?
And that actually was a win for everybody
because it meant that this fairly dry topic that no students were excited about
turned into this really interesting topic
about a population of people who are blind
interacting with computers through screen readers.
And so students get to experience that while learning this basic foundational material.
And so they enjoyed it more, the instructors enjoyed it more,
and accessibility was part of that curriculum.
I get a lot of students coming up and saying,
“Are there research opportunities where I can
further our understanding of access technologies?”
“Are there other courses in the Information School
where we can learn about accessibility?”
“Who are the faculty on campus that know more about this?”
“I have a friend that has a disability and I've never really understood
how they engage with technology.
Now I understand it better.”
So some of those really concrete experiences
and linking them to the bigger ideas around accessibility,
I think are really powerful for students
who are still seeking out majors and ideas.
Even one lecture in a class, even half a lecture in a class,
can completely change the way a student thinks about the world
and how people interact with technology.
Because this is not something that they've ever thought of before.
Those small encounters with big ideas can be really impactful.