Narrator: Technology companies want their products to appeal to a wide audience
including people with disabilities.
Universities need to teach about accessibility in their computing courses
to meet workforce needs.
Richard Ladner: 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 gonna use it.
Does the person who's gonna use it have a disability?
And if so, does your software actually work for them?
or is it dis-abling?
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.
You know, if you're in a bar - sports bar, something like that,
and everybody's cheering and you want to see what the announcers are saying,
well you can read it.
Andrew Ko: 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.
Richard: 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 someone who is blind?
So that's the conversion of a visual image to a tactile image.
So I did a whole lecture on that.
Andrew: 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 most students weren't excited about turned into this interesting topic
about a population of people who are blind, interacting with computers through screen readers.
So students get to experience that while learning this basic foundational material.
And so they enjoyed it more, instructors enjoyed it more,
and accessibility was part of that curriculum.