AccessComputing

Many challenges to increasing the participation of students with disabilities in computing have been reported by faculty, staff, students and other stakeholders.

Shiri Azenkot at Cornell Tech teaches a class on interaction techniques (e.g., text entry and scroll bars). When designing the course, she considered her constraints (time, curriculum requirements, and expectations) and how her course might compare to similar courses across institutions. Rather than including accessibility in the course with an “accessibility lecture,” where she covered everything about accessibility in one short lecture, Shiri chose to integrate disability throughout the course.

Yes. For example, there is a community of individuals who are blind and use the Arduino platform to build hardware devices.  Arduino allows users to build digital devices that can sense and control objects in the physical world.

Background

Professor Cowen teaches a capstone course in computing. Students are required to give oral presentations discussing their final designs. Professor Cowen is concerned that a student in her class, Amy, will have difficulty with delivering her presentation. Although Amy has not expressed concern about the presentation assignment, Professor Cowen is concerned because Amy is autistic and rarely joins classroom discussions.

LeadCS.org disseminates resources for K-12 district and school leaders, teacher leaders, and others who wish to develop computer science education programs. The online collection of resources includes

Some students with learning and other types of disabilities may need additional time to complete assignments in lab courses. Described below are examples of how extra time could be provided to an individual student.