RICHARD LADNER: My name is Richard Ladner.
I'm a professor emeritus at the University of Washington
in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science
and Engineering.
And my colleague here is Amy Ko, who
is a professor in the iSchool at the University of Washington.
And the other organizer is Kristen Shinohara,
who is at Rochester Institute of Technology, and she's online.
Kristen, are you here?
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Yes I'm here.
RICHARD LADNER: Hey, great to have you.
And the three of us put together this, not
allowed to call it a workshop, event to try and get
more people to teach about accessibility and disability
in their classes.
And we thought a good way to do that would
be to bring in some people who had been doing this for a while
and then have them talk.
So none of the three of us are really going to talk.
I'll be advancing slides and Kristin will do introductions
and Amy will have a little introduction as well about
the logistics.
So welcome everyone from wherever you are.
Hopefully you all registered.
If you haven't registered, you can still do that.
You just have to go to the SIGCSE website
and then go to our event and you can register right there.
Also we're going to have an evaluation at the end,
you don't have to do it here, but you could do it later.
And everybody that's registered will get an email just
as a reminder to do that evaluation.
Just a tiny bit about AccessComputing,
it's a National Science Foundation
funded Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance.
It's been funded on a number of grants since 2006.
And we just have a new grant.
And as part of this grant we're trying
to promote and advocate and move people
to teach more about accessibility in their classes.
Of course you want to teach your class accessibly as well.
That is make sure that every student can participate.
And at least one of the speakers today will talk about that.
But the rest of the speakers are going
to talk about how they've integrated accessibility
and disability into their computer science classes.
Intro classes, software engineering classes,
development classes, all sorts of classes.
Hopefully we'll have time at the end.
We have 13 speakers, each will have 10 minutes.
There's going to be a couple of breaks.
So hopefully, we'll have time at the end to do breakouts.
And the breakouts here would just
be human breakouts with real people.
And the people that are online will have their own breakout
rooms.
It would be too difficult to integrate everything
in a small space like this.
So we'll go through the 13 speakers a little bit later.
I wanted to mention that as of this morning,
or a few hours ago, there were 23 people in person registered.
There's more than 23 of you out there, so a few of you
haven't registered yet, so please do that.
And once you're registered for this
you will get on our mailing list for AccessComputing of course
you can opt out later, but that'll
give you more information as time goes on
about teaching accessibility and lots of other things
about disability and accessibility of computer
science.
So there's too many people.
That's more than 60 people.
So we're not going to do individual introductions.
And I've introduced Amy and Kristen, our leaders.
So let's see what's next.
Amy, do you want to come up and do this segment?
Amy's in charge of logistics, she's good at this.
AMY KO: All right, hi everybody.
So, the first thing that we want to point out
is just the agenda.
I think Richard talked about this already,
but we're doing our welcome now.
We'll have two groups of talks.
One group from 3:45 to 4:45, for just an hour,
they'll all be short 10 minute talks.
If you're speaking, please keep it to 10 minutes
so that we ensure that it's short.
We'll track time and try to keep you to it.
We'll have a short break.
So those in person can do some networking,
online can do some networking.
And then we'll do another chunk of talks from 5 to 6:10.
And then we're going to have some breakouts at the end
to just really service some of the questions
around specific content areas in CS for teaching accessibility
and to get you some affinity groups around some
of those topics.
There is one logistical thing which
we think is the interactive part of this, which
is that link on the top right over there,
which is obscured by the Zoom thing, can we--
BRIANNA BLASER: I already put it in the chat for folks online.
AMY KO: That's these slides.
And it's one Google Slides doc.
So you can open that up on your machine,
you can follow on the slides, you
can go backwards and forwards, you can even
comment on the slides.
So if you have questions or thoughts or opinions,
consider this document a shared resource,
so feel free to contribute to it there.
And at the end, during the breakout,
we'll be writing notes inside the Google Slides
to for your breakouts.
So think of this document as the one place
where we're all working together.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: But first up we
have Devorah Kletenik and Rachel Adler.
I apologize if I mispronounced names.
Please go ahead.
RICHARD LADNER: They should be able to unmute themselves.
RACHEL ADLER: Hi, so I'm Rachel Adler and Devorah Kletenik,
I think you're here too.
DEVORAH KLETENIK: Hi, everyone.
I'm here, but you take over.
RICHARD LADNER: Just tell me when to advance the slides.
RACHEL ADLER: OK perfect.
So you can just advance to the next slide
because we're going to introduce ourselves there.
But Dr. Kletenik and I both teach at public universities.
Devorah is an assistant professor
in the Department of Computer and Information Science
at Brooklyn College, part of CUNY.
And she has included accessibility topics
into her Human Computer Interaction, E-commerce,
and Game Development courses.
And I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Science at Northeastern Illinois University
and I've included accessibility in my Human Computer
Interaction and Web Development courses.
For both of us, this started because we
were awardees of a Teach Access faculty grant.
You can go to the next slide.
So we had a bunch of students from both
of our institutions working together
to create accessibility simulation
games that we wanted to integrate into our computer
science courses.
So in addition to having accessibility concept,
we wanted it to be engaging.
We tested this the first time in the spring of 2021
and we recruited 113 students from both of our universities.
I was teaching Human Computer Interaction at the time
and I also recruited a faculty member teaching
the other section of HCI, to go into her class
and use these accessibility simulation games
and Devorah was teaching a Game Design and Development
course in addition to an E-commerce course.
And so we wanted to see how this would go.
You can move to the next slide.
So before I describe the actual games that we used,
I'm going to tell you a little bit about them.
So initially we had three games.
One for colorblindness, one for auditory, and one for physical.
Since then, we've created--
do you hear me?
Hello?
BRIANNA BLASER: Yep, you sound good to me.
RACHEL ADLER: OK perfect, I thought I heard someone
say I was breaking.
OK, so we have those three versions
and since then we added blindness and low vision.
But I'm going to talk about the color blindness,
auditory, and physical first because those
were the ones that we tested in the spring of 2021
and we're still in middle of analyzing our results
from the fall of 2021 where we included
both blindness and low vision.
So each of the games has four rounds.
In the first round we have game mode,
where we play without simulated disability
and we're just playing the game yourself.
Then every round two of the game is simulation mode,
where now you're simulating a disability
and you're playing as if in this disability
and it makes it more complicated,
of course to play and to win the game.
In round three, we start introducing
accessibility features.
So now you you're playing as if you would normally
play but you can see the accessibility features
included.
And in round four you're back in simulation mode
but the accessibility features are still there.
So you now have the opportunity to play and to win the game.
We can go to the next slide, please.
So here's the colorblind version.
I'm going to show you how the rounds look.
In the colorblind version of the game,
this is a pop ball game, where on the screen,
you can see it says pop green and you'll pop green
and then it will change to pop red.
And if you get it right you get a point.
And if you get it wrong, you lose a point and the computer
opponent gets a point.
We were trying to make engaging, interactive, competitive games
to attract the students but also teach them about accessibility.
So after round one we go directly into round two,
where now we're in simulation mode
and we're simulating colorblindness.
So now even though it says green,
I have no idea which one is green.
And it says pop red but which one is red?
So it's going to be really, really hard to win this round.
When we get to round three we start introducing
accessibility features.
So here instead of only relying on color
we have letters which represent each color placed
inside each ball.
So an R for red is in the red balls.
And a G for Green is in the green balls.
And this is the round three which
always has both the accessibility
and playing as yourself.
But then we go back to round 4, and the twos and fours
are simulation mode.
So now we're once again in simulation mode
simulating someone colorblind, but we keep
the accessibility features.
So we still have the G and the R's inside these balls,
so now you have a chance to play and win the games.
And we do a similar thing for physical.
So in the physical round when you get to round two
you can't use the mouse.
All of a sudden the mouse is shaking.
And you could play and you could even win the game,
but it's not fun and it's hard because your mouse is shaking.
So then in our round three we start
introducing accessibility features
where you can use your keyboard to navigate the different balls
instead of only relying on the mouse.
In the auditory version our round one
is a little different.
Instead of pop red or pop green being written on the screen,
you can hear it.
So I hear someone say "pop red," and I'm popping red
and then I hear a "pop green," and I pop green.
So at this point, I'm able to still play and enjoy the game
but I get to my round two simulation mode
and now I am simulating someone who is hard of hearing.
And at this point, because of that you can't hear anything.
So there's no way to know if you're supposed to pop red, pop
the green ball, and it makes it much more
difficult or impossible to really win the game until we go
back to round three where we introduce it
in writing on the screen in addition to being
able to hear it.
So that when you're in round four, simulation mode,
you still have the words on the screen.
And at the end of each of these games
we also have a Tips page, teaching
about how you would design for each
of these disabilities, the tips for designing for people
with those disabilities.
You can go to the next slide.
OK-- I think, let me just go back,
I think we're going backwards.
I think can we go to the next slide.
I think we're moving the wrong way
RICHARD LADNER: Oh I went the wrong direction.
RACHEL ADLER: Yeah we're going backwards, sorry.
I could talk in reverse.
OK, so now integrating into our courses.
So we were doing this in both online and remote sections.
We didn't have any in-person back in spring of 2021
but we had both formats of our courses.
And the students completed a pre and post-surveys
on their attitudes towards people
with disabilities and measuring their understanding
of their challenges.
I'm not going to go into details on that
here because we do have a SIGCSE paper, which we'd
love for you to read and watch our video there and come
to our author's corner session tomorrow at 12,
so I won't go into those details.
But I do want to get to the next slide
and talk to you about general feedback and comments
that we got from our students.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: You have about two minutes left.
RACHEL ADLER: Thank you.
Luckily I talk really fast.
So we found that the accessibility simulation games
were helpful in increasing student empathy
and awareness regarding designing
for people with disabilities.
Specifically, we had really a lot of positive comments,
and we took out a few: We learned about accessibility
in class and we saw examples of it.
But having the simulation shows how difficult
it is for people with disabilities
to even play a simple game.
It made me realize how much more effort we
need to put into our design so everyone can use it.
It is easy to read, watch, or hear
how people with disabilities have it tough,
but once you experience what they face it really
drives the point home.
This test made me think back to recent games and applications
that I have used and realize that many of them
are almost completely unsuitable for people with disabilities.
Next slide, please.
So we really had a lot of positive feedback
and we are still working on improving it.
As I mentioned we've added a couple of other disabilities.
We're working on adding cognitive disabilities as well.
We would love for everyone to try it out and send us
any feedback.
It can be easily added into accessibility courses, HCI,
web design, software development,
and it's good for experienced computer science students.
But one of the novel things that we feel that it's good for
is also novice computer science students or even non-majors.
We've had non-majors in our classes
that we've been testing it on and we
think it could be really good for anyone
because it's just a game we don't require HTML knowledge
or any types of computer skills.
And actually because of that, that
leads to our current and ongoing work.
We've been working on versions for K through 12 classrooms.
And last semester I was teaching a web development class for K
through 12 teachers and I had an accessibility week topic using
these games and we received really positive feedback
and the teachers said that they thought
it would be suitable for all levels, high school,
middle school, and elementary school.
And now this semester we're actually
going to be piloting our first middle school
classroom using these games.
And we're going to hopefully continue
working on that to see how to make it even better for all.
So even at a young age you learn about
empathy for people with disabilities,
in addition to learning about design
and how it could be challenging.
And the challenges people face.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Great, thank you very much.
That's at about time.
I'm sorry I have to cut you off there.
But we want to keep to our schedule
so we can fit everyone in.
Just a quick reminder, if you have any comments or questions,
feel free to put them in the Zoom chat.
I think you can also add comments to the slides
through the link that's at the top of the slide deck here.
Yes, so if you have questions for each presenter,
please feel free to add those to the slide deck.
I want to introduce now Michael Moore.
I'm also going to give you a 10 minute Warning
and start your timer.
So please go ahead.
MICHAEL MOORE: Hi, my name is Michael Moore.
I'm an Instructional Assistant professor at Texas A&M.
And just a little bit of background about myself,
I learned sign language as an undergrad
and worked for many years as a sign language interpreter
and kind of had an interest there.
And I did that work in parallel with getting my PhD.
And now I'm really excited because I
can take my passions for accessibility and computer
science and bring them together.
So let's go ahead and go to the next slide.
I'm at Texas A&M. We're a large University.
We have about 73,000 students.
Our computer science department, it says 1,400,
but we have our College of Engineering now has
a common first year program for all freshmen coming in,
so that does not include freshmen
who are potential students coming up,
only sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
And what I did, was I created a standalone course
on accessibility.
So not all students in our department
are required to take the course but any
can take it as one of their computer science electives.
We have a highly flexible curriculum.
And I've put a link to my syllabus
if anyone is interested in that.
So I'm teaching it for the third time this semester.
And so now it's being considered to become a permanent course
in the curriculum, assuming it goes through all the University
channels and gets approved.
The first time I taught it was a very small 18 students
but this semester I have 71.
And I imagine that might go up to 100
eventually because that's our class
sizes that we have to teach.
And this semester I actually did graduate students as well as
undergraduates.
But my kind of main objectives in this class
are getting students to understand the barriers
people with different disabilities have
when working with technology, a bit about the standards that
are kind of the de-facto things that people should do
to make things accessible, get them to think
a bit about advocating.
Because a lot of these people will
go to companies that maybe don't incorporate disability
in all areas, but be able to kind of like cogently
say why their company should be doing that.
And that's becoming more and more needed
as lawsuits and stuff ramp up.
And also whenever we do the checklist,
like the standards, to be thinking beyond that.
To what is the problem, not just filling
checking off a lot of boxes.
We can go to the next slide.
So this slide I had a little trouble
going with because everyone was supposed
to talk about their integration approach and mine's more
kind of like, here fully in your face.
But like I said, the big focus in the course
is understanding barriers.
I do a lot of in-class discussions,
where we'll kind of introduce a topic
and then students will break up into groups where will
they have those discussions and I walk around
and we do some debriefing.
I utilize several guest speakers.
This semester I've already had a deaf student,
a couple of people who use wheelchairs,
and I have a blind student scheduled for next week.
And with these students, these people come in,
they're able to talk about their experience interacting
with technology with their particular disabilities
and the students have opportunities
to ask questions and get that deeper understanding
of those barriers.
One of the things I like to do is, it was hard to do it first
with large classes, but have presentations.
Because students need that practice presenting but also
presentations give this ability for students
to get exposed to other things.
So I currently have a couple of presentations I do.
Earlier in the semester I had each student research
some particular disability.
It ranges from blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy,
neurodivergent, dysgraphia, dyslexia,
there's a lot of things.
And some things, to be honest, for me it was instructional.
Because they frequently found things
that I hadn't been aware of and learned a lot in that process.
But having that many students do presentations
to the entire class is challenging.
So I usually break it up where the students do peer-grading.
And I set up sessions and part of the class
will present in one session, the next part of the class
will present in the other session,
and when you're not presenting you're
attending other people's presentations.
I kind of do it as a round robin thing,
where instead of having multiple people are presenting
at one time and they have a small group of people
they're talking to.
So I do that for a current disability
that they choose early on and later
on I ask them to go find a scholarly work, maybe
something from the SIGACCESS conference
or from CHI that's related to disability
and then they make a poster.
And they present the posters to each other in a similar manner.
So it gives them some deeper exposure
to things but also by sharing this material
with the whole class they get exposure
to a lot of other interesting ideas
I also incorporate a team project.
The students select a barrier and try
and think of a way to overcome that barrier.
I wanted some examples.
And what I do in my classes, I basically
have an introduction discussion and we have a class activity
most days in class.
And so those prompts vary a lot.
I do a section on discrimination,
where I get people to think about privilege and disability
and whatnot.
One activity I did was, we talked
about textual descriptions for videos.
So I had them watch this Frozen trailer,
that you can follow that link later if you'd like to,
and to try and write an audio description.
So a person listening to that description
gets a full feel for that.
And I actually incorporate some of my sign language concepts
in there, because when I learned to interpret
we're supposed to convey the spirit
and intent of the message.
To get it to be more enjoyable to listen to,
not just having all the facts.
One of the assignments I use at the end of the semester,
is I have to make a one minute video
where they're supposed to do an elevator pitch to convince
someone, somewhere that they should
be incorporating accessibility into their products.
And it works well because it's a nice summary
of what they picked up over the entire semester.
And then I have quizzes.
And the quizzes, what I'd like to do with those
is have them reflect on something.
So it's not so much a quiz about, do you know something,
a fact check-off.
Because also thinking about the way different people adjust
for disabilities, because of timing
and some students need extra time,
I try not to give quizzes that are
done in the classroom, kind of in this very
constrained environment.
So my quizzes now are pretty much, here's a quiz question,
do it by the next day or something.
And that gives people the time to reflect and write.
So there's usually not things with correct answers
but things that kind of reflect what they've been learning.
So I think that may be--
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: You have about two minutes left.
MICHAEL MOORE: I have about two minutes left
and I finished all my--
Oh no, oh my experience.
Yeah, so my experienced is left.
So what I found is that most of the students,
it is an elective course so most students who take the course
are motivated to learn about, they're not there just
because they have to take it.
They generally have chosen this because they
think it's something they want to learn more about.
I do teach this at a more higher conceptual level.
And so what I have kind of picked up
is that students get motivated about the high level
but they still miss a lot of the details
even though we cover them.
But I will say that that's common amongst all of us.
I'll just think of one comment, I
was looking over to the slide deck the other day
and looked at all the images and I didn't find any alt text
in our entire slide deck.
Which is something that you would hope students
putting any images on any document
that people have access to would have an alt text for them.
The students the first time I taught
it liked the guest speakers, so I've
tried to incorporate more of that
and I might do that more and more so in the future.
And like I said, my reason for doing this,
I touched on it earlier, is I had this kind of interest
in accessibility.
Got exposed to a lot of things and I'm just really trying
to bring in my love of computer science
and the love of equity for people with disabilities
together.
And I'm hoping that by the time students finish this course,
they have some good basic knowledge that can go out
into the workplace and they'll know
where to go to look to start incorporating things
and also to be an advocate for equity for everyone.
So all right, then the guidance.
I'm also going to be looking for other things.
I'm really interested in how we can bring accessibility
into other courses in the curriculum
not just a specialized accessibility course.
And there's contact information in my web page
if you want to get a hold of me.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Great.
Thank you so much.
That was right on time.
So I really appreciate that.
MICHAEL MOORE: I had my own clock set up.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Yeah, that's awesome.
Again if you have any comments or you
want to connect with presenters you
can make comments in the slide deck.
Up next we have William Bares.
And again I'll give you a two minutes when the time comes.
WILLIAM BARES: OK, it is a pleasure to be with you all.
I'm William Bares from Whitman College.
My research background is in Computing in the Arts
and Intelligent Design Assistance
and so this is a natural segue to accessibility.
I was recently awarded a Teach Access grant
and what I'll be talking about is
how this grant unfolded in a new class
that I was teaching at Whitman College.
Whitman College is a private liberal arts college
that serves approximately 1,300 undergraduate students.
I teach in the Computer Science Department.
And I'll be talking about accessibility in a new course
that was offered for the first time fall 2021.
Intelligent User Interfaces that is an elective in our program.
Next please.
And this course was offered as a special topics
for the first time.
It enrolled 19 students, primarily juniors and seniors,
who are computer science majors and all
of whom had completed our computer science one
and data structures course.
Since this course was combining aspects
of artificial intelligence and user interfaces
we were able to really explore a lot of ground.
For example, applying natural language
processing to recognize text requests.
And this fit really well with accessibility
because you can use voice and natural language as a way
to make things more accessible.
The Teach Access grant was specifically
centered around motion tracking and eye tracking devices.
And so we looked at how these types of input modalities
can make software more accessible.
And then the students all created a number of projects
that applied these techniques.
Next please.
And the integration approach was to tie accessibility
throughout the whole course.
The students were really excited by seeing examples
of real people using eye tracking systems and motion
tracking sensors that allowed them to interact,
and they found this really exciting.
So I had initially planned to incorporate accessibility
as a smaller number of modules but I wound up
filling it in to pretty much every topic that we did.
So for example, when we looked at natural language processing,
we looked at being able to apply a natural language
toolkit, called spaCy, that's used from Python.
And we were able to recognize spatial prepositions;
on top of, to the left of, for example.
And then we talked about and looked
at examples of how navigation aids for blind people
to move through buildings use these types
of spatial propositions to be able to produce directions
that relate to where a person is located in their environment.
And so they could see where these ideas
could get applied later.
All of the students created a final project
that applied what they learned.
And so for example, with the natural language processing,
they had a smaller initial assignment
and then later for the final project some of the students
chose to add voice-to-text to their natural language text
assistant, so they could create a fully hands-free
intelligent design assistant.
Next please.
And so here are some examples of the things
the students did in the class.
So one of the smaller assignment prompts
was to create a natural language text assistant that
could interpret instructions like draw a picture where
a dragon was to the left of a wizard.
And they could tell a story by creating pictures
in this fashion.
And initially the first version of this program
was done as a one week assignment,
and they use the spaCy natural language processing along
with HTML and JavaScript to display the graphics.
All of the students recorded a Wizard of Oz video
of their project being run with an off screen assistant typing
the text directions while they spoke it in front
of a large projection screen.
So it created a really neat effect
to preview what might be possible with the voice input.
And this was able to get the students excited
that a number of them wound up doing a voice-to-text
and they created a pizza ordering system
where you could speak the pizza size and ingredients that you
wanted.
For the motion tracking aspects, we
looked at how motion tracking systems
can amplify range of motion.
So you can demonstrate a small limited range of motion.
For example, if you're suffering from a stroke, and then
scale that limited range of motion.
So it produces the same effect as someone
with a full range of motion.
And so a pair of students created
a floor-projected pong game, where one student
was able to make a small range of motion
to move their paddle the full length of the floor,
whereas the other student was using the full range of motion
as they walked from one side of the room to the other.
Another application applied eye-tracking
and created an educational game where
the player interacts with the program entirely using
eye-tracking.
And they learned design guidelines,
like making the eye-tracking targets large and easy
to click on.
Next please.
The most exciting thing was the students really
were motivated by this.
And it really pushed me to create
more integration of examples of accessibility
throughout the course.
The biggest technical challenge had
to do with connecting the eye and motion tracking devices,
which are ordinarily programmed in Windows
unfortunately, to the computers that the students were using.
So I chose WebSockets and JavaScript and HTML
so that the Windows program would stream the motion
data over WebSocket, so that way the students
could use Chromebooks or any devices
to program their interfaces.
The students were very excited about this
and it really encouraged a lot of creativity.
OK, next please.
In terms of the biggest takeaway,
I'd like to thank the Teach Access
organization for their support.
The course materials and source code
and samples and step-by-step guides
will soon be shared as the Teach Access repository.
I've provided a early preview link in the slide.
And I welcome new collaborations.
I'm excited about things like dance and motion,
immersive projection, storytelling,
intelligent design assistance, ways
to use creativity to make applications
more accessible and exciting to everyone.
So thank you very much.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: All right, great, thank you very much.
Again, we're on time.
So if you have any comments you can drop them in the slide deck
by adding a comment to the slides if you would like.
And now I'd like to introduce Regine Gilbert,
did I say that correctly?
REGINE GILBERT: Oh Hello, everyone.
I really wish I was there in person
but I have to teach tonight so I can't be there.
Thank you.
Next slide.
I'm an Industry Assistant Professor
at the Tandon School of Engineering
in the Integrated Design and Media Program department.
I work within the Ability Project
which is an interdisciplinary research space dedicated
to the intersection between disability and technology.
The courses I teach is User Experience Design
and Looking Forward, an assistive technology
course teaching students about assistive tech used in Blind
and Low Vision communities.
Next slide.
So my User Experience Design course is taught each semester.
I've been teaching it for the last three years.
Emphasizing accessibility for students,
for both their individual and team projects
with real life client.
The course objective is to learn the fundamentals
of user experience, research, and design.
Next slide.
So I begin teaching about accessibility
in the very first class.
I found this to be helpful.
I start with a lesson on ableism because a lot of students
don't know what it is.
In addition, students research plans
templates include a section on accessibility and inclusion.
I reference texting as something we all benefit from
and it was actually created for the deaf community.
And that is something that is relatable to what
I found to work, is finding things
that are relatable to the students in their day
to day lives.
Next slide
Students incorporate accessibility
into their research plans, which I think is very key.
I think oftentimes accessibility is an afterthought.
I've worked on the corporate side,
I've worked in different industries,
and is often an afterthought.
So thinking about making a plan and incorporating accessibility
into it is super important.
So each week the students have a different area of accessibility
they learn about.
For example, if they're working on
desktop or mobile application.
They reference the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
and if they're working on a service,
they have referenced the universal design guidelines.
Next slide.
So many of my students don't know anything
about accessibility.
In past courses students have volunteered and worked
with people with disabilities.
I have found this to be extremely helpful, except we've
been in the pandemic for the last two years,
so that part has been a little bit difficult.
The best part for students is learning and working directly
with people with lived experiences.
Recruitment has been challenging but with the help of the Teach
Access grant I was able to incentivize
students co-designers with gift cards for their participation.
So by the end of the course, they
have learned and more importantly care
to make things more accessible in their work.
Next slide.
So offers and requests, I am looking
to recruit more people with disabilities to co-design
with my students and would like to know resources people use.
I have connections with the Blind community
and I'm looking to connect with other groups.
Thank you.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: All right awesome, thank you very much.
Moving right on to our next presenter, Meg Ray.
RICHARD LADNER: Meg is our only speaker here in the room.
MEG RAY: Exciting.
I'm very excited to be here in person.
Thanks, everyone.
So my name is Meg Ray and I am an Adjunct
at Hunter College which is part of City
University of New York, CUNY.
But I also have been contracting with the Central Office
On Instructional Design, because they have a mission
to incorporate computational thinking and computing
literacies into every single Teacher Ed program within CUNY
at all of our colleges.
So two of our associated colleges have run pilots.
One was a Queens College, which I was not involved in.
And the other was that Hostos Community College, which
I'll be speaking about today.
So the context is, I joined the team at Hostos as a Consultant
and Instructional Designer.
We had a grant from the Robin Hood Foundation
to rebuild an Introduction to Instructional Technology
course, with the intent of turning it
into a course where education students would be exposed
to computational thinking.
And we decided within this process
that accessibility is a core computational literacy
and that needs to be part of these courses as well.
So this is Education 226, it's actually
taught by the Director of the Office of the Educational
Technology at Hostos.
And it's run three times now in a hyflex model,
which is extremely challenging.
But professor Guevara is very good at it.
And each semester we've seen an increase in enrollment.
So students from any department can enroll,
but we also have funding so that teachers from the New York City
Department of Ed are also able to enroll in these classes
to get credit, which helps with their pay set.
So we have all sorts of students.
We have students who are working as paraprofessionals.
We have students who are in an education track
and they want to transfer to a four year college
to major in education.
And then we have active New York City teachers.
The majority of students are multilingual learners.
The majority of students at Hostos
speak Spanish as a primary language
and then most students there are working full-time jobs
and the majority of the students in the courses
have also been parents, which I mention because that
was a driving force that they reported in their motivation
to sign up for the course.
So what does this look like?
Well, this course has four modules and one of the modules
is dedicated to UDL and accessibility.
So each module can actually run independently
if we wanted it to.
Their inquiry-based, they use what's called the 5E model.
And then the all also use project-based assessment.
And also the modules can be taught separately.
So they're developed in Blackboard,
which is used across the CUNY system
and any professor can grab them and just add them
into their course, if they want to.
So what do they do?
So first we talk about ableism and after that we
go into accessibility and then universal design
and finally assistive technology.
So we want it to cover all four areas.
And teachers are required to then demonstrate their ability
to design accessible lessons, specifically related
to computational thinking and computing.
And then they need to continue to do
that in their future modules.
So this is just one example, they have a digital notebook.
So one of the things they do is they create
a mini how-to for colleagues.
Here's one thing you can do to make
your classes more accessible.
They can pick the topic and they create a how-to guide
that they could theoretically share around a K-12 school.
Other activities they do, they evaluate a K-12 digital tool
for accessibility.
They create how-to guides for teachers.
They do research on specific assistive technologies
and incorporate assistive technologies
into their lesson planning.
And then they also create lessons and materials
for whatever grade-level they specialize in,
that are both universally designed and accessible.
So we've gotten wonderful feedback from students.
They come in not saying, well yes accessibility
is theoretically important, but by the end
they report really understanding that it
can benefit more students than just the students they identify
as needing some kind of accessible tool.
And then they report that they feel less overwhelmed.
They practice, so they feel empowered to incorporate it
into their teaching.
We want, with their artifacts, for them
to be able to turn around and use them in a K-12 classroom
the next day if they're actively teaching.
The other thing that I personally found
is that some students, who don't identify necessarily as,
oh I have a disability, will realize
that they do have accessibility problems with technology
themselves.
And that they've been sort of creating workarounds
in all of these things.
Instead of thinking about accessibility
and how to advocate for themselves and their needs.
So I think that's a really neat side-benefit.
Future plans, so Hostos is very excited about this
because it's been so successful.
So they want to create a pathway that
is specific technology to Computational Thinking
and what we're calling Computing Literacy, which we're
including accessibility within.
And then Hostos eventually would also
like to require these modules for every single student who's
majoring in Education, a two-year Education degree
there.
And they plan to do that by actually dividing up
the modules and spreading them throughout multiple courses.
Again, I'm really excited about CUNY's vision
to have every single pre-service teacher, education
major learning about computational thinking
and computer science.
I would like to see accessibility
be part of that package.
So if you're interested, please be in touch.
I have my Twitter and email.
Excited to talk about this.
Thank you.
RICHARD LADNER: Before you leave,
can you just say what UDL is?
MEG RAY: Oh yes, sorry.
Universal Design for Learning.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: All right, great.
Thank you very much.
I think we can move on to our next speaker.
I think this is our last speaker before the first break.
So if you do have comments, you can add them
to the chat on the slide deck, can add comments to the slides
that we shared the link to before we head out to break.
And I want to introduce Deborah Sturm.
DEBORAH STURM: Yes OK.
Hi, thank you very much, very happy to be here.
Next slide.
So I'm a professor in the Department
of Computer Science at the College
of Staten Island, which is also part of CUNY.
So I think we have three CUNY groups in this batch of talks.
Our college has about 14,000 students.
It's a comprehensive college within CUNY,
which means that we offer two and four year degrees.
Within Computer Science, we have our Bachelor's
of Science and Computer Science, which is ABET accredited.
We have a joint Math-Computer Science degree.
And we have an Information Systems degree.
In addition, we have two two-year degrees.
Our Bachelor's of Science degree has optional specializations
and one is in Game Development.
The others are in High Performance Computing
and another one in Network Security.
Over 13 years ago, I co-developed two game
development courses and more recently introduced
a Serious Game Development course
and that was in conjunction with the Teach Access award.
Next slide.
So I want to talk a little bit about where this is positioned
within our degree.
This 200 level elective is directly
after, it only has one prerequisite,
and that is the introductory computer science course.
So this is a little bit unusual in computer science degrees.
Usually students have to wait until they
take Data Structures, which you see
in the diagram on the right, which is an orange.
And then the 400 level electives are only after that and very
often students they take their electives
at the end of their academic career
and they're about to graduate.
By placing these early electives at the beginning
of their career we introduce advanced topics
at an earlier stage.
And if students become interested in that
they can pursue these interests later on
and it gets them more excited about the degree as well.
So these have been very successful.
The students can take two 200 level electives
and they're equivalent to a 400 level course.
They include a lab component and have each of these
have a cap of 20 students.
So that's very nice.
Our game development courses, as you can imagine,
are among our most requested electives.
Which makes them a very good place
to put other features, other ideas, that we
want to present to our students because the students are
so excited to be taking a game development course.
In the serious game development course
they create a 2D game-based learning
app that assesses and teaches college level material.
So for example, some of the courses
that students have created in this course
are Ninja Calculus was one of them.
Another one is Meducation, which is teaching about medication.
And also Haunted Decoder, which is
to teach binary octal and hexadecimal conversions.
OK so I think we're on the next slide.
Our integration approach is firstly to raise awareness.
And we have one lecture devoted to this.
And for that, we modified the resources
from a professor, which maybe Kristen can help me
with the pronunciation, if she's there.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Yes, I believe it's Huenerfauth.
DEBORAH STURM: OK there you have it.
From Rochester Institute of Technology.
He has excellent slide deck so we might try that.
And then another lecture is specific to games.
Where we demo and discuss successful games.
One very nice example that some of you may have seen
is from Columbia University, Dr. Brian Smith.
And he created a course that is a racing
game for blind players.
But in addition to these two lectures,
the students are integrating accessible features
into their games.
So we introduce the ideas at the beginning
and then throughout the rest of the course
they are introducing them, they are they're implementing them
into their games, and then they're also graded
on whether they've put them in.
And other students in the class also play the games
and give them feedback about the game in general
but also about the accessible features.
Next slide, please.
So we focused on games for colorblind players
and visually impaired players.
What a lot of students did was, in their game
if they had a dialogue, they included keystrokes
for example, the letter T to activate
reading the text-to-speech.
Reading the text.
So for example, with the Meducation game,
a patient's come into a doctor's office
and they say what their symptoms are and they
have a conversation with the doctor and all of that
can be read to the player instead
of the player just reading it.
Another assignment that I think can
be integrated into any course was very, very effective.
And that was that we ask students
to take their own phone and to look at all the accessible
features on it, take screenshots, explain what they
are, and then talk about which ones they think they could use
and which ones they think were not implemented so well,
and which features gave them the idea then to add to their game.
Next slide, please.
So we participated in the Teach Access survey in this course.
And we had very nice outcomes.
So besides being able to--
the improvement was in defining the purpose of the ADA,
explaining the WCAG and other guidelines,
give an example of inclusive universal design.
We had very nice improvements on all of those.
And I think because of the phone exercise,
we got a very nice return on have you ever used
assistive technology, because most of them
have had never used it.
And by using it on their phone, in order to do that assignment
they became much more aware of the accessible technology
that's out there.
Some of the feedback: I will keep universal design in mind,
this way it accommodates everyone.
I will add a color blindness mode,
assistive ideas like subtitles.
I will use applications such as color blindness tests.
This allows you to see what it looks
like what your images look like to someone who is color blind.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Right, about two minutes left.
DEBORAH STURM: OK next slide.
So here are some of the resources where--
and there are a lot online about adding accessibility
to games in Unity particular methods
to add the proper colors to a game so that's the second one.
We create our games in Unity.
The racing game for blind players is the next one there.
But there are many, many more.
And then in summary, I want to mention--
summarize what we spoke about, that we started about 13 years
with a game development course because students
are very interested in games.
And then, because we wanted to introduce games
with a purpose, several years later we
introduced this Serious Game Development course,
which has been very successful.
And then because of the Teach Access
grant we added accessibility to it.
And pretty recently, the last few years, ABET
has added accessibility to their criteria.
They're becoming much more aware of it.
And my feeling is because of ABET, because
of groups like this, the groups that are meeting today,
there is a much increased recognition
of the need for adding accessibility.
And more than that, there is increased recognition
of the value of adding accessibility.
Thank you very much.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Great, thank you so much.
So we are actually at our break time but we are a little--
So thanks, everybody.
I hope you had a really good break
and were able to get a little bit of networking done.
Again just wanted to remind folks
that we have shared the slide deck for everyone.
There's the bit.ly URL in the top right corner of the slides.
If you go to that URL, you can actually leave a comment
in the slide deck if you wish to connect
with presenters or other participants
of this workshop/event.
So please do that.
Again, I'm going to be keeping time
and everybody gets 10 minutes.
So I will give a warning at two minutes,
just to let you know how time is going.
So I think we are ready to start.
And I would like to introduce our first speaker
for the second portion, Elissa Weeden.
ELISSA WEEDEN: Hi, everyone.
First, I want to thank Richard, Kristen, Amy, and Brianna
for organizing this wonderful session.
This is how we applaud in ASL.
And I am a Caucasian woman in my late 40s,
I have long brown curly hair with more strands of gray
than I would like to admit to, and I'm
an Associate Professor at the Rochester
Institute of Technology.
I use the pronouns she, her, and hers.
Next slide, please.
So the context of the accessibility curriculum
at RIT, which I would like to discuss with all of you today.
RIT is a private University, located in the Finger Lakes
region of New York.
It is a private university.
We have approximately 16,600 undergraduate students
and about 3,000 graduate students.
And RIT is divided up into several colleges.
One of which is the National Technical Institute
for the Deaf, and so it is not uncommon to have
ASL interpreters in our classrooms
as well as real time captionists.
Another college at RIT is the College
of Computing and Information Sciences,
which I am a faculty member within.
And we have about a quarter of the undergraduate population
are computing students, which is fantastic and wonderful.
We have about 4,200 undergraduate students,
about 960 graduate students, enrolled
across eight Bachelor of Science degree programs
and nine Master of Science degree programs.
We also have a PhD program as well.
One of the areas within the computing colleges
is the School of Information, which again that's my area.
We have about 420 undergraduate students
enrolled across three Bachelor of Science computing degree
programs and approximately 300 graduate students enrolled
across four Master of Science degree programs.
The undergraduate degree program that I'm going to focus on
is our Bachelor of Science and Human-Centered
Computing, which enrolls about 70 undergraduate students.
And it really is a collaborative degree program,
bringing in not only computing but elements of psychology
and design as well.
So our graduates can find careers
as UX designers, user interface developers, product designers,
software developers.
And within Human-centered Computing,
we have our accessibility curriculum.
So all Human-Centered Computing students
will take Design for Accessibility.
It's offered once per year, it enrolls about 20 students
per year.
And then for students who want to dive deeper
into the area of accessibility we
offer a three-course concentration
that includes Access and Assistive
Technology, Accessibility Through the Lifespan,
and Research and Accessibility.
And so those are the courses that I'm
going to dive into today.
Next slide, please.
So our required course Design for Accessibility
has a prereq of Prototyping and Usability Testing.
And this is where we introduce students to disability
and accessibility.
So the major topics include legislation, regulation,
guidelines, and standards, including the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines.
We also go through the principles of universal design
and go through accessibility and the design process,
including individuals with disabilities
as part of the design process.
We cover sensory, motor, and cognitive accessibility.
Students are exposed to various assistive technologies
through a grant that I received through Teach Access.
We also cover web accessibility as well.
Some of the key activities that occur in Design Accessibility,
I have students do a universal design scavenger hunt,
trying to find good and bad examples of the seven
principles of universal design.
Students also gain experience captioning a video,
creating a script for audio descriptions of a video,
composing sufficient alternative text for images,
and conducting an accessibility evaluation against the Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines.
And again they do get exposed to various assistive technology
devices.
Next slide, please.
Our first concentration course, all of the concentration
courses have Design for Accessibility
as a prerequisite.
The major topics covered in Access and Assistive Technology
include the Human Activity Assistive Technology Model,
the adoption and potential abandonment
of assistive technologies.
We go through assistive technologies
related to auditory, cognitive, mobility,
and visual challenges.
We also cover augmentative and alternative communication
systems.
So some of the key activities in this course,
is an exercise to make Golisano Hall,
the building that the course is offered in,
evacuation accessible.
Creating digital and manual communication boards
and then exploring scanning techniques
for the communication boards using switches.
Students also get experience in writing Braille
with a slate and stylus as well as
exploring some additional assistive technology devices.
Next slide, please.
The second concentration course is
Accessibility Through the Lifespan.
So we go from birth to death, the entire lifespan.
We go through an overview of human development.
Laws related to education accessibility,
technologies that can be used in the classroom,
recover universal instructional design,
accessibility in employment, and aging and disability.
Some of the key activities in this particular course
are watching a series of documentaries
that talk about the Disability Rights Movement
as well as experiences of individuals with disabilities
in employment.
So that would be the Bottom Dollars documentary
and The Grown-Ups documentary.
We explore different assistive technologies
that can be used to support individuals
throughout the entire lifespan.
And I do utilize guest lectures as well.
Next slide.
The final course in the accessibility concentration
is Research and Accessibility and in this course
I have students do a deep dive into
the accessibility literature.
So they learn what conferences and journals
are available that focus on accessibility.
They learn about the scholarly publication and peer review
process, how research can get funded,
the structure of a scholarly paper,
organizing and conducting a literature survey,
and guidelines for writing about accessibility and disability.
So some of the key activities in this course
is having students hone their critical thinking skills,
ability to read a scholarly article,
think of it from multiple perspectives,
be able to assess what was done well and areas
where it could have been improved.
Students get exposure to presenting scholarly papers
in front of the class and facilitating and moderating
discussions with the class on current research.
They get exposure and practice to summarizing scholarly works
through the creation of structured abstracts
and annotated bibliographies.
They also get the chance to play the role of a peer-reviewer
and they get experience conducting a literature review.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Less than 2 minutes left.
ELISSA WEEDEN: Thank you, Kristen.
And so the strengths of having all of these dedicated courses
that focus on accessibility is it
allows students to do a deep dive into that area.
Again, I did receive a Teach Access faculty grant
and that grant showed that there was improvement and awareness
around accessibility in the Design for Accessibility
course.
Some of the concerns though, is that students
don't take the required design course until the spring of year
two and sometimes the concentration courses are
canceled due to low enrollment.
So moving forward we're looking at ways
to expand the students that are able to take these courses.
I am interested in collaborating with others on research
related to accessibility education.
My email is included on the slide.
Thank you everyone for your time.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Awesome, thank you very much.
Again folks, if you want to connect
with presenters and with others you
can leave a comment on the slide deck
through the URL in the top right corner that you see there.
And so I would like to introduce our next presenter
Elaine Short, go right ahead.
ELAINE SHORT: Hi, everyone.
My name is Elaine Short.
I use the she series pronouns.
I am a white woman with short brown hair
wearing a black shirt.
I am distracted by the fact that I lost my ability
to see myself, which makes it hard for me to describe myself.
Yes, I am an Assistant Professor at Tufts University
in Computer Science.
Let me go to the next slide.
I can tell you a little bit about Tufts.
So Tufts is a private university in Massachusetts.
We are a predominantly white institution.
Our tuition is over 60k a year, to give you
kind of a sense of the vibe.
Tufts is, as of the last I knew, the smallest
R1 University in the US, I think driven largely
by our med school.
Historically the School of Arts and Sciences
and School of Engineering have been undergraduate focused.
But we have a growing research presence.
Computer Science at Tufts is one of the largest majors,
actually I just checked, we are the largest major.
Our major, like everywhere, our enrollments have exploded.
We've grown by 67% since 2015 and the number
of graduating Computer Science majors
is 20% more than the next largest major, which
is international relations.
So we see a lot of Tufts students in our classes.
And we have somewhere around 300 graduate and post-bac students,
and that's across all years.
I have 600, 900 students total.
So the course I'll be talking about today
is Introduction to Human Robot Interaction, which
is the course that I teach.
I am a roboticist.
That said, all of my degrees are in Computer Science.
Intro to Human Robot Interaction has typically
been 30 to 35 students.
I've been teaching it for a couple of years now.
It's required for a cross-departmental degree
in Human Robot Interaction There's both a master's
degree and a PhD in Human Robot Interaction and home major,
where that whole major is Computer Science, Electrical
Engineering, or Mechanical Engineering.
My students are about 60% Computer Science students,
30% Mechanical Engineering, 30% CogSci.
So we get quite a few people coming in
from the CogSci program.
20% are actually from the HRI program.
It's 40% graduate students.
You'll notice that doesn't add up
to 100%, that's because there's overlap
across all of these categories.
But the key point here is that I'm only at about 60%,
just over half of my students are Computer Science students.
I get a lot of students from other majors.
And although it's required for the HRI program,
most of the students in the class
are not from that program.
The primary objectives of this course
is that we have three core-required courses
in the Human Robot Interaction curriculum.
This is the human-focused one.
I think of it as a little bit the intersection of HCI
and robotics.
The field of Human Robot Interaction, if you don't know,
really emerges from the combination
of these two other fields.
HRI is a SIGCHI conference.
So the HRI-- mini-HRI conference is a SIGCHI conference,
so we have a strong presence in the CHI community area,
a foot in the CHI world.
A couple of things that I care a lot about in this class
are that students have the opportunity
to actually program robots.
They are not the world's most advanced robots,
but every week they have an assignment
in which they have to get the robot
to do something and design an interaction
between a person and a robot.
A lot of the students are interested
in assistive technology.
We have at Tufts an excellent Human Factors program,
in which many of the students are
interested in assistive technology.
And we also have an Assistive Technology certificate
in the Occupational Therapy program.
So I see a fair number of students
who are either in Human Factors or in Occupational Therapy.
So I would say probably somewhere between a quarter
and a third of my students in any given semester
would describe themselves as being very interested
in assistive technology.
But they're mostly coming at it from what
I would call a standard engineering perspective
on assistive technology, where they're here to save the world
and save the people with disabilities
from their terrible fate.
All of that previous sentence having a strong sarcasm tag
on it.
So if you go to the next slide.
My goal for this class is to basically get
students thinking about disability rights
and thinking about accessibility as a component of HRI design
and think not just about assistive technology
but also about accessible technology.
The big goal here is to get students
to be able to reflect critically on the current state
of research in HRI.
It's a little bit of an activist component here.
I should add, if you don't know me, I have a disability
and I have a lot of opinions.
And so those two things together mean that one of my projects
is that all of the HRI students will graduate
with a good sense of what they should be looking
for in this assistive technology and accessible technology
research.
I also like for students to be able to actually critique
robot designs from an accessibility perspective.
Next slide.
So this is my--
there's a lot of words on this slide,
you can take the words on the right-hand side
of the slide, which is the small words of which there
are very many.
You don't need to read all of these,
but I wanted to put them there, so you could have them
if you wanted them.
And this is an example of an activity that works really well
in class.
I call it a Paper Scramble.
And the reason I call it a scramble is because it's
training students not to read papers carefully, which I know
is sort of contrary to what we want students to do sometimes.
But before students can read papers
carefully they have to be able to read--
to skim papers to figure out whether they're relevant
and do a quick high level evaluation.
So I connect students to the last three or five
years of proceedings of the Human Robot Interaction
Conference.
I have them skim the papers and I assign one group
to each of the questions that you see on the right-hand side
or there that are listed on the right-hand side.
And I ask them to count papers.
So the questions all ask the students
to count how many papers, for example,
take a social model approach to disability
versus a medical model approach disability.
And one of the more powerful questions
is, I ask how many of the papers,
for example, actually include participants with disabilities.
How many of the papers focus on caregivers.
How many of the papers focus on clinicians.
And then I have all the groups present to the class.
So next slide.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: About two minutes.
ELAINE SHORT: I am not going to need all those two minutes.
But I decided to separate this into joys and challenges.
One of my real joys is students being
able to notice and start to understand
the medical and social model.
I certainly appreciate the ways in which
that's a little bit reductive but at least
getting students to start thinking about disability,
not purely from the medical perspective.
But actually think about the ways
in which accessibility and barriers created by society
are impacting people's experiences of disability
and not just sort of the physical conditions
of their own bodies.
I find the students at Tufts really
care about social justice, they want to do good in the world.
They are very eager to learn about these things.
They love getting to criticize the state
of the art in research.
They like being able to say, like Wow
I notice that very few of the HRI papers
from five or ten years ago actually include any evaluation
with people with disabilities even when they
say they're building assistive technologies.
And they also like to notice things like, Wow
all the videos from last year had closed captions
but in previous years none of the videos have captions.
So that part's been a lot of fun.
In terms of challenges, I think I find that students will still
miss sometimes what I would consider to be
obvious accessibility barriers.
I cannot single-handedly combat all of institutional ableism
in research.
And so there's definitely still some residual ableism
in the approach to assistive technology that students have.
Especially as students, their initial approach to things
is very grounded in previous approaches, which again I think
of as a little bit saviory.
And wanting to, really focusing on medical solutions,
versus being able to step back and ask,
is a focus technology something we really need here
a technological solution.
Or are we do creating trying to create technological solutions
to problems that really need to be solved
by community and social change.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: And right about time.
ELAINE SHORT: Oh OK, so I guess I did need two minutes.
Yeah and in keeping with that, students
like the glamorous tech solutions.
My materials are available.
I'm interested in PDF accessibility,
especially if you do anything with math or PDF figures.
And I'm very interested in connecting with other people
with disabilities, especially students
who are interested in robots either as researchers
or as hackers or hobbyists.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Great, thank you very much.
And we'll move on to our next speaker, Kathy McCoy.
DEBRA YARRINGTON: Hi, I'm Deborah Yarrington,
and I'm going to do the talk.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: I'm sorry.
DEBRA YARRINGTON: No, that's fine.
Yeah, so I'm Deborah Yarrington.
I'm from the University of Delaware.
Next, can we, OK.
Yeah, so just to give you an idea,
the University of Delaware has about 18,000
undergraduate students.
Our department has 570 undergraduate students, which
I attended a session this morning
and found out that that's actually not nearly as
big as I thought it was.
I sort of thought it was a large department
but it turns out it's really small.
I am an Assistant Professor.
I am a teaching track professor, which
means my focus is on teaching.
I mostly teach data structures.
Although I've taught all of the intro courses.
One of the things I have to mention
is that the largest semester I've ever taught
had 430 students.
Most semesters have around 200 to 250 students.
I am also the faculty liaison for a program
that we have called Spectrum Scholars.
Oh I'm sorry, it was updated but the updates didn't show up.
OK I'm also the faculty liaison for a program called
the Spectrum Scholars that we have on campus, which
is a program that helps transition students who
are neurodiverse from high school to college
and from college to the workforce.
And so I'm the faculty liaison for that.
So, want to go to the next slide.
So where I was headed with this, I
was working with high school students.
No excuse me, I was working with the Spectrum Scholars,
and one of the things we wanted to do, is we
wanted to create a set of rules and guidelines
for creating a classroom experience that
would be friendly for people who are neurodiverse,
while simultaneously not losing any
of the experience for everybody.
So we didn't want to diminish the experience
of the classroom, while we were making sure
that we were making it as friendly as possible for as
many people as possible.
And we wanted to come up with a set of guidelines
that could be used by other professors, who
are teaching larger classes.
Because a lot of the rules we were seeing
when we were looking into this were rules
that when you have a stressed out professor who's
teaching 200 students, it wasn't practical to cater
to each individual, pull each student aside, talk to them.
You can't do that with 200 students.
So we were trying to come up with a set of guidelines
for professors to actually be able to implement
in their classroom.
So what I did was I actually went
and I talked with a high school that was specifically
working with students who are neurodiverse
and talked about what they were doing in their classroom.
And then I came up with a set of things
that I did in my classroom to try to make
it more friendly for everybody.
And again, with the idea that what I was coming up with,
the rules that I was coming up with,
would be things that we could actually
share with other professors depending on how well they work
and wouldn't be impossible for them to implement or put
in place.
So that's where I was headed with all this.
OK so here were some of the course modifications
and the guidelines that I was working on.
The first day, an ice breaker, where we basically
broke students into groups and had them
work on a set of class rules that was specifically
promoting inclusivity.
And that was just that was a really great activity,
it worked, it was easy, any professor could do it.
I would highly recommend it.
The kids came up with fantastic rules.
Some of the rules were things like,
no being mean, including the professor.
No interrupting anybody unless there's a fire or blood
involved.
So they came up with some really cool, fun rules
and they also sort of set guidelines
for what they were considering acceptable behavior
in the classroom.
And as I said, this is something anybody could do.
Next thing, give as much advanced warning as possible
for everything.
So no pop quizzes, no in-class assignments
due at the end of class.
I found that out the hard way.
I had a student who really had horrible anxiety because I gave
an assignment that I had due at the end of class,
with the assumption that way they
wouldn't have homework or anything hanging over them
after class.
And it turned out it really just completely stressed
my one student out.
So another guideline would be nothing
that's like got a time deadline, and again also
as much advanced warning as possible.
So if I'm not going to be there I
tried to tell them at least two weeks ahead of time, if I know.
For every single thing, give them
as much warning as possible.
The other one was, include a reason for everything.
So why am I having you turn it in with this format?
Why am I having you write this function?
Why am I having you give me screenshots of your output?
The students, especially, were very concerned about why
do I have to do this extra work, or why
do I have to do it this way I want to do it my way.
And this was something from the high school teachers,
that explaining is very useful.
And so just giving a reason for everything
and again this is something that anybody
can do for every assignment.
This one was kind of interesting and this again, came from a tip
from high school.
Incorporate a certain amount of flexibility in due dates.
And my first reaction to that was, I got 200 kids,
I can't incorporate a certain amount of flexibility
into my due dates.
But what she was saying was, give them a due date
and then say, Yeah but you know what,
you have three days after that where I'm not
going to give you any penalty.
It's kind of like the thing you do
where you set your clock 10 minutes ahead of time
and pretend like that's the actual time.
That's kind of what we're doing with assignments now
for students and oddly enough like it's really worked well
for all my students.
So this is something that's been really useful
and I highly suggest doing it.
And again, this is something any professor could do, no matter
what size class they have.
Because in essence you're just telling him
it's due three days before it's actually due.
And so that worked.
Include time estimates for every assignment.
And the other thing I also did was,
so I basically said I took how long it
took me to do the assignment and I tripled it.
And I just put that on the top of every single assignment.
So that was again something easy, any professor could do.
I also included how you should do the assignment.
So like, this is something you should
do for one hour every night the first week
to get an estimate of how long it's going to take you.
And then figure out how you're going
to plan your second week of this project.
Or this can be done in one sitting
as long as you don't start on the last day, that sort
of information, to give them an idea of how long they should
plan for.
And the other thing was giving a clear instructions
for how students should handle pretty much anything.
But especially things like office hours.
Because for a lot of students, especially students
who've never been to college before.
any and all students, coming to an office hour
with to a professor is really anxiety provoking.
And if you have a set of clear rules
this would be a really nice.
Like it makes it easier for students to feel
less stressed about approaching a professor.
So I also incorporated a clear set of rules.
And again this is something that--
it actually benefits professors to do this,
like it may be a little bit more time up front,
but for most professors this is something that would really
be beneficial because it's going to help them in the long run.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: You have about two minutes left.
DEBRA YARRINGTON: OK I'll go faster.
I thought I was talking fast.
OK, go ahead.
OK.
This is the coolest thing I did.
I incorporated non-competitive, cooperative, non time-based
games and activities.
So like a Murder Mystery where students go and they
work together as a group.
And they go into a room and they actually
solve a problem in the room.
And when they solve it, they get the key to get a clue and a key
to the next room.
And they keep moving from room to room.
And at the end they have to solve the murder mystery
to find out who died.
The IT-Spy, they have to do something very similar,
where they unlock a code to get documents
that they can send to the press to save the world.
Simple game where you click on squares and it shows squares.
So none of these were time-based.
None of them involved competition, like you
against me or anything like that.
All were cooperative, non competitive.
And they were a lot of fun to work on
and the students really like them a lot.
OK, go quick quick, I'm talking fast now.
I'm sorry, next slide.
OK.
So just end of semester summary, all students
took a questionnaire felt the class was inclusive
and had a welcoming environment.
Many expressed appreciation.
Students really enjoyed the games and asked for a lot more.
Many students expressed a desire for more group activities
in the class and more opportunities to get to know
and bond with other students, which
was very interesting and surprising just how
many students requested that.
Just again, I can't actually tell--
I don't have a list of students in my class
who are neurodiverse, so I can't actually--
but students who had identified to me as being neurodiverse
both gave quite positive feedback
and were very happy with the class experience.
Next.
OK, so things I want incorporate,
things that I still think should be part of what professors do.
Timelines on assignments.
So like basically, this should take five minutes,
this should take 20 minutes, this
should take two days, that kind of thing.
Clear step-by-step instructions for more than just office
hours, for anything that's averse, for anything
that's unanticipated.
More non-competitive cooperative games.
And possibly having someone proofread
assignments to check for ambiguities, which is a big one
but it's hard to do.
So I don't know quite how to incorporate that
into every class.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Unfortunately, we're
at about time.
And of course again, I want to invite
folks to add comments to the slide deck
to further connect with Debra.
All right, up next we have Paula Gabbert.
PAULA GABBERT: Hi, I'm Paula Gabbert.
I'm from Furman University and I'm really
excited to be here and thank you for the opportunity to come.
And it's just really exciting to see the number of examples
that have grown over the years since this kind of activity
started.
So you can go to the next slide.
So again, Furman University is a liberal arts institution.
We offer both a Computer Science and an Information Technology
major.
We have about 2600 students and about 75 to 100 majors
at any given time.
Our major starts with a breadth-first
look at the discipline, our CS0 course.
And what's somewhat unique about this course
is that we introduce the topics of computing
through the lens of an application area.
And the instructor gets to choose
what that application area is.
So we all cover the same sort of basic computing concepts,
but we do that through different lenses.
So we have one with social media as the lens, one
for bio-informatics, one on games.
So when I was choosing my application area
I decided to choose accessible technology.
I have a passion for that area.
And so that's what I'm going to talk about today,
is my specific course is the CS0 course that focuses
on accessible technology.
Again, it serves both computing majors and non-majors
at Furman.
So if you're a Computer Science major
you take this course as the intro into the major.
But if you are a non-major, earning a Bachelor of Arts
degree, you can actually use this course
to satisfy our math and formal reasoning general education
requirement.
So it's really kind of fun to have both majors and non-majors
for this particular topic, it really
results in a lot of different perspectives,
multiple perspectives coming in, which
helps the discussions for this course.
So the next slide talks about our primary objectives
in this class.
I want to motivate the need for universal design principles.
I really focus on legal, political, financial issues
surrounding accessible technology.
And I kind of surround these conversations
with these big questions.
And these big questions aren't ones
that I came up with, they primarily
came from the Lazar and Stein book, which
I have the students read several essays from that book.
But we look at how can we provide access
to digital information to all people at the same time
and at the same cost?
Who should pay for the cost of developing
accessible Technology?
How does technology aid people with disability?
And how does technology exclude people with disability?
So these are sort of the big questions
that we talk about in terms of disability and accessible
technology, while at the same time
exploring computer science topics.
And students really seem to like this sort of merging of ideas.
I take a global perspective.
We look at the United Nations Convention
on the Rights of Persons with Disability and the World Health
Organization report.
We look at the National level with ADA, the Americans
with Disabilities Act.
And then I oftentimes will have our Accessibility Resource
director come and visit our class
so that they sort of have a more local view of these issues
specific to our institution.
And so again through this exploration
I hope to have students develop an empathy for people
with disability and help them motivate, especially
our budding computer science majors,
motivate the need for accessible technology.
So in the next slide I just give a sample of some of the topics
and how I can provide accessibility links
to those topics.
So again, all of our CS0 courses talk about data storage.
I specifically talk about translating
from one type of data to another using OCR, speech-to-text,
text-to-speech, and those kinds of issues.
All of our sections talk about operating systems.
But for my section we go in depth
and explore the accessibility options
on the MacOS Including the voice control, VoiceOver, zoom,
flash/speech alert settings, and so on.
So they have a lab where they get in and dig into those.
All of us talk about algorithms and programming.
I illustrate simple speech-to-text and
text-to-speech libraries in Python, that are actually
fairly easy to utilize.
And so they do some really simple programming activities.
All of our CS0 classes do at least two
to three weeks of programming.
And so in those two to three weeks in my section,
I really kind of let them play around with these Python
libraries and they have fun with some basic programming examples
and programming concepts.
We all talk about software development
and software engineering.
And then in my section I connect that to agile methods,
advocating for user involvement.
I use Haben Girma's presentation to the Apple developers
conference as a resource.
We watch that video and talk about the importance
of incorporating these universal design principles when
we are developing software.
So this is just a sample there are other topics.
I also do the World Wide Web, we do a whole section
on the Quickhack guidelines, networking architecture,
we talk about artificial intelligence and graphics
applications, and connect all of that to accessible technology.
The benefits to our curriculum is
that it helps support universal design principles
for the curriculum.
So we are basically sort of applying the universal design
principles to our curriculum development.
We want to design our computing curriculum with accessibility
in mind from the beginning, right in the intro course,
not as an add-on class at the end.
And this intro class provides a springboard for our majors
in the class to continue broadening their understanding
of accessibility issues as they continue
through the curriculum.
Accessibility concepts intersect with many of our core computer
science concepts so it's really easy
to do this in the intro class.
And it provides again, a broad context
for those accessibility training that they're going
to get in the later classes.
So that spiral approach of seeing it early and often
throughout the curriculum, that is our goal, by introducing
that in the CS0 class.
We have the added benefit, on the next slide,
because we have non-majors in the class what
has been really fun for me is to see the added benefit for those
who aren't necessarily going to be Computer Science majors.
So at the end of the course I asked them this question,
I asked them to reflect on their current major
or potential major and I asked them
how can your discipline contribute positively
to minimize social impacts of disability
and include all persons in the activities, information
access, and communications within your discipline?
And I have several quotes, I'm just
going to show you one today, that really
highlight how students in other majors
really internalize what they've learned in this class
and hopefully we'll take this information on with them
to their own areas.
So an English major wrote, as a reader and writer
I know how important it is to include
all voices in the literary world,
particularly those voices that have been historically
unheard by fighting for more accessible e-books, keyboards,
and other technological aids, my field
can benefit from hundreds of untold stories.
And it's really been very fulfilling to read these quotes
from all the different majors, but specifically
for the non-computing majors.
And seeing how impactful that is, and the importance
in our service courses, to ensure
that we have accessibility content in those service
courses for our non-majors as well.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: About two minutes left.
PAULA GABBERT: Which is fine.
So in the future, our introductory courses for majors
need to motivate the need for accessible technology.
And the question is, how do we do this in all
of our introductory courses?
So, they sort of see this in our CS0 course
but then we don't necessarily follow through with it
in all of the introductory courses,
in our programming courses, and we really
need to do a better job of that.
We also have other service courses
for non-majors and so sort of the challenge for us
is, how do we incorporate these issues into all of our service
courses so that we can better prepare,
not only our majors, but our non-majors who
will be creating accessible or digital technology
and digital information.
And making sure that we do that in our service courses as well.
So that is all I have.
Thank you for having me.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Great, thank you very much.
I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Yasmine Elglaly
and Catherine Baker.
YASMINE ELGLALY: Hello, everyone.
Could you hear me?
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Yes
YASMINE ELGLALY: Yes.
OK excellent.
So I'm going to talk about work that I
did with my colleagues, Catie Baker,
she's attending in person.
And Kristen Shinohara.
I'll be talking about the first part of the slides
and then Catie's is going to continue the rest.
The work that we did was happening among the three
institutions that the three of us
are working at between RIT, Western Washington University,
and Creighton University.
All the courses we will be discussing today
were mainly taught in Western Washington
and also at Creighton University.
And the courses we were looking at
are mostly CS1 and CS2 courses.
Our motivation for that was two things.
So one is that in teaching schools, and many other CS
majors, HCI courses where accessibility are sometimes
taught, it's an elective course.
Which means something CS graduates would
go through the whole major without being
exposed to accessibility.
And another motivation that we wanted to cover accessibility
in early courses, in core courses in CS,
is that previous research was also
found that students, by the time they graduate,
they may forget about what they learned in HCI courses.
So if they start early and they learn
in core courses about accessibility
and then hopefully they get HCI the topic
or the concepts related to accessibility
will be more enforced.
So next slide, please.
So how did we do that?
I would like to ask people on Zoom and also people
attending in person, have you thought
CS1 or CS2 courses before?
Could you like raise your hand if you're in person?
And could you react with an emoji
if you have ever thought CS or CS2 course?
I see some thumbs up, great, OK thank you.
And Amy, thank you for showing the audience, thanks.
So I assume you have some in the audience, which is great.
So you may agree with me that making a change in CS1 or CS2
is challenging.
Mainly because it's already full with topics.
And as many students have different levels of familiarity
with programming or data structures
it is kind of really challenging to make any changes to that.
And you will need to support those
who are learning for the first time
and keep students with more advanced knowledge
and programming also engaged.
So our idea was not to add a topic about accessibility,
but rather change some of the background story
about the programming assignments
and make the story about accessibility.
Similar to some of the assignments that
were given today, there is something students
are trying to solve a problem, they are trying to solve.
So we would like to make this problem
related to accessibility.
One thing I did in a course that I was teaching,
it's all about C under UNIX.
So we do a lot of low-level programming.
The old assignment was meant to teach students
how to use pointers, how to do dynamic allocation
for the memory, how to open files, read from a file,
and write a file.
And the old story was, let's do some security fun stuff.
Let's decipher a file and then try to decipher this file.
So I took this assignment as-is, with all its learning
objectives, did not change a thing,
and only for the background story instead of deciphering,
encrypting or decrypting the text,
we are going to transform this text from ASCII to Braille
code.
And with that students would learn about Braille
and they learn about refreshable Braille display.
It's an add-on learning objective rather than
a new topic.
This assignment is also available on GitHub.
I did not have taking a lot of time, did I Kristen?
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: You have about five minutes remaining.
YASMINE ELGLALY: OK, that's good.
CATHERINE BAKER: So a second assignment we've done.
So this one was an assignment that was originally
looking at like, reading and files, kind
of storing data and objects within a list,
and then searching through the list
to find kind of things that match certain criteria.
So like the old kind of focus was things like,
searching for all the books that an author has written,
or looking for all the cities that
are above some cost of living threshold.
So those were like previous versions.
So the version that we created was actually,
it turns out that the UK, their Digital Government Services
actually provides a test suite on accessibility.
And they have gone through and they'd
run this test suite on the WCAG Guidelines
for a bunch of different accessibility checkers.
So I took their test results, transformed the text file
into something that was kind of at the level of the students,
where they were with learning to read files.
And so they were asked to actually
kind of do a little bit of analysis of this test suite
in order to kind of practice reading files,
searching through lists, and things like this.
So they got exposed to kind of the WCAG Guidelines,
exposed to different accessibility testers,
they already kind of become aware of that.
And they get exposed to just what
are the things that they should be thinking about,
regarding accessibility.
Because then they see the entire test suite and see like,
Oh these are things that I shouldn't be doing.
Like the example content is shown
by location, things like that.
And so it had a bunch of different tests
that they could look at.
And so both of these assignments were really great
because they were accessibility, but they were really focused
on the core CS kind of options.
And so what we're really hoping is,
we're trying to create assignments
that are little overhead for an instructor to adopt.
So especially for those who maybe don't feel confident
in accessibility.
These are assignments that someone can look at and go, OK
like I have enough knowledge to be able to teach that,
to integrate that.
And if students see a piece here,
a piece there, then suddenly they're thinking about it more
and they'll start learning more and then
when they get into a class it covers in more depth
they're going to realize the importance already
and it'll be a reinforcement.
So the one thing we did notice, is
we were a little surprised by how easy it
was for students just to kind of completely
ignore the topic altogether.
Like they saw the technical challenge, like pointers
or lists or whatever, and just not even kind of recognize
what the data was.
And so one of the things we've been looking at
is things like adding discussion or reflection.
So like for my assignment, which was the test suite,
I actually have them first generate the results
to see how good are these test suites.
Look at specific categories and which ones are better.
Which ones can they do automatically,
which ones require human intervention.
And actually investigate one of the tests
to say, hey, look at this test, figure out why it matters,
who would this affect if you didn't do this?
And so we found that even those little things help students
kind of really engage with the material a little further.
And so we're looking at how can we
make them go a little deeper and not just kind of,
it's all gibberish, that it could
have been nonsense data input.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: We have about two minutes left.
CATHERINE BAKER: Perfect.
The two assignments we've discussed,
we've got the full kind of assignment on GitHub.
And we did have a paper at the CHI Extended Abstracts and CHI
2021.
And actually we will be expanding this.
So we were fortunate that this work ended up leading
to an NSF grant.
And so for the next couple of years
we're going to be kind of expanding these modules
and we're actually looking for instructors
to potentially test them out.
So that's something that we're kind of working on,
to try and test them at new institutions.
YASMINE ELGLALY: And you already raised your hands,
so we know you're there.
CATHERINE BAKER: So yeah, if you're interested,
reach out to us.
We can tell you more.
Or the website also has our contact information.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Great.
Thanks very much.
And we can move on to our next speaker, Joel Ross.
JOEL ROSS: All right can we hear me OK?
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Yes.
JOEL ROSS: All right.
Hi, I'm Joel Ross.
I'm from the University of Washington from the Information
School there.
Next slide.
So who am I?
So I'm an Associate Teaching Professor
in the Information School.
I primarily teach in our undergraduate program.
Our informatics program, which is our undergraduate program,
kind of centers on a lot of the intersection between technology
and human values.
It's sort of our logline from our mission statement.
But so, our curriculum has a mix of information theory, design
courses, design thinking type courses, and then
sort of technical programming classes.
Which often will emphasize sort of applied technologies.
Right, how do you build a system that then does something?
Which is what I teach.
And then also, looking at how technology
may impact equity issues, accessibility issues,
sovereignty issues, justice issues.
So a lot of the point here is that a lot of our students
are primed to--
students that come into the informatics program, so they
take our program, are often the students
that are interested in these kinds of topics.
So students will come into, even if they're
interested in doing technology based work
and they want to eventually go do some software development
work, which is not all of our students.
A lot them want to go into design or project
management or different ways.
Often they're sort of already interested in learning
about things like accessibility and how
that might be able to then, like those are the kinds of topics
they are engaged in already so we sort of
have primed be able to do that.
So the course that I teach primarily
and that I want to talk about today,
is our 340 Client Side Development course.
So this is of course on Front End Web Development, focused
on making web applications.
So it starts with, it's basically your standard web
development class, but like a big one.
Starts with HTML and CSS, we move
through JavaScript interactivity and we sort of end
with using complex libraries, frameworks
like the React system in particular
is what we're driving at right now.
We have 70 students per section, offer five or six sections
a year, so we're continuing to grow
and so we keep offering more every year.
The course is a required course.
It's one of those sort of required technical classes
for the Informatics degree.
And so students are to get a degree in our program,
they are forced to take this class.
It has a couple of programming prerequisites,
so generally they're expected to take two quarters of what
used to be just Java but we've opened
that up so they take two quarters of either Java
or Python.
They've also taken a quarter of R,
they basically have 3/4 or a full year
of programming backgrounds coming into this
as we're going.
The overall course structure is then
built around a set of weekly practice problems, which
are all automatically graded.
So students have some instructions
to write a web page that meets these guidelines, follow
these steps instructions to actually more or less practice
the syntax, and you'll practice applying the ideas
the materials we've sort of gone over.
Those are all auto-graded, students
can auto-check their work to make sure that they're
on the right track.
And if they run their grader and the grader
says they did something wrong, they go fix it.
So they do some iterative development work.
And then we have a larger, quarter-long project
where students design and build their own web application
of their choosing, sort of in groups.
Just say go build something you want
to demonstrate that you've mastered all these skills.
And I have a link to the current syllabus
if anyone wants to see what that looks like.
All right, so next slide, please.
So the way that I've tried to integrate accessibility
into this course, is to really include it from week one.
It's not technically day one, I think we really
dig into accessibility around day two,
but it's from sort of the first week of class.
So I use accessibility in web context
as sort of a primary motivation for why we are
writing HTML semantics at all.
The entire point of writing code to make web pages render,
is to make it visible and accessible to various people
and that includes both sighted users and sort
of who our students often would think of as someone using
the web, but also Blind users who
are accessing through screen readers or other forms
of disabilities.
Screen readers is sort of a primary,
and binaries are sort of the primary stance
that I sort take in trying to support accessibility.
But there's a lot of acknowledgment
about other systems, other forms of accessibility
that we support as well.
So that's where we sort of address
the idea, sort of like this is why
we're doing what we're doing.
Like the whole point of this course
is to be able to support accessibility.
And then we build that into the core structure
in different ways.
So accessibility and making your code,
your web pages accessible is a requirement
for this quarter-long project.
So from day one they're writing to figuring out
what they're proposing, what they want to build.
They have to make sure they're presenting
that in an accessible way.
Making sure they are, from that first step,
thinking through how is this going to be supported.
How will this support non-sighted users?
How will you be able to--
how will this be an accessible kind of system?
So they're thinking about that at from all stages
of their design, all stages of their implementation.
So the intent, sort of the goal I'm trying to take
is to really treat accessibility as kind of an integral part
of web programming.
It's not a separate topic.
It's not that we're doing web programming,
we're learning how to do this sort of development coding work
and then we're also learning accessibility,
and those two things have to mix together.
I'm trying to really treat it that we're
learning web programming and that means doing it accessibly.
Like, that's the right way of doing it.
I'll often frame this similar to how a core CS class might frame
something.
Oh sorry, go back one slide, please.
Cool.
I'll often frame to this, that this
is how we would-- similar to how you think about coding style,
right?
If you're saying like, Oh you need
to write your code this way because that's
the way you write it, because that makes it readable,
because that makes understandable,
that lets your computer be able to grade it.
That's the same thing we do with accessibility.
The reason we're writing it this way
is because that's the way it needs to be done.
So I'm trying to treat it at that same kind of level
as a sort of a practice and skill
that students just need to do.
So web pages are written this way
because that makes them accessible.
That's why we write-- that's why we
use this HTML in this particular way.
All right next slide, please.
I've included sort of two examples
of how accessibility is most prominently mentioned
within my course.
So as I said there's two main structural pieces to how
the course is built. There's a set of practice problems
that are sort of these automated problems
and there's this overall project.
So this is an example from one of the early practice problems.
I think this might be the second or third problem
that they have to do within like, the first two
weeks of class.
Where they're practicing learning how to write HTML.
One of the objectives of the assignment
is to practice writing HTML syntax.
Getting your angle brackets in place, making sure
you're getting elements nested inside of other elements.
But we frame this around, well you're
trying to write accessible semantic HTML,
so you're trying to make an accessible semantic form
in this case.
So the instructions on what students are asked to do
is to take an existing piece of badly semantically defined web
page and to rewrite chunks of it to make it accessible.
They're going to go fix the tags to make them actually
follow the semantic behaviors.
They're going to add in the alt attributes on images.
They'll add in the ARIA descriptions when needed.
They basically are walked through, well here's
how you would take something that's not accessible,
that if you were sitting down to write web without actually
thinking about any of this, how you might throw together a web
page.
And actually try to go ahead and make that page accessible.
And then I just said this is an automated system,
so they go ahead and they write their code
to make these changes or following
through these instructions, which have also what to do
and then the motivation on why we're doing this, what
the benefit there is thereof.
They can run it through there the grader.
The grader will say, yes you have done this thing correctly
or no this does not look correct.
And then students can go back and revise it.
So they can until they understand how
you're able to get it correct.
I also have examples of how accessibility is built
into the project requirements.
Where it is one of the six things
that students have to do.
One of them is making it accessible.
So it's again, a major chunk of this project.
Where they have to make sure things are accessible.
This is I think the screenshot from the actual final project,
requirements they have to turn in.
But they had to do this from the various drafts they're
learning along the way.
So they've had to do it the whole way through the class.
And I've then being able to read both checklists to students
like hey, these are the things that we cover, the low hanging
fruit for you to think about.
Make sure you're doing this.
Like this should just be your baseline knowledge
to understand how to make this accessible.
And then sort of more details are provided as well.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Have less than 2 minutes left.
JOEL ROSS: Great, I'm going well then, OK.
Next slide, please.
So in terms of whether this works or not,
in terms of success, anecdotally I
think students do actually think about accessibility.
I haven't done a thorough research
on how well this is working or not.
But anecdotally, students will actually
engage with these topics.
I'll have students in office hours
asking, Oh well if I build my system this way,
will it actually be accessible?
They'll actually ask complex questions
like, well I'm trying to make a form that works this way,
how can I make sure that can be accessible?
It is a requirement for the project,
but that's all that as well.
One of the big challenges though with this integrated,
like making accessibility part of your web system,
is that as with all programming students
tend to focus on mastering the syntax.
Like getting something to work before
they think about the design of it.
So they'll think about, well, how
can I get my function to run, before they
think about is my function actually built
in a way that makes sense?
The same thing applies in web.
So students will often focus on, how
can I get the thing to show up on the page at all?
And then, only then, do they begin thinking about,
OK was I actually doing it in an accessible way?
So it's often hard to get them to be thinking about both
of those things simultaneously, because they're struggling
with syntax while also trying to struggle with general ideas.
Some of the accessibility issues fall off
as our apps become more interactive.
In particular because some of the ARIA support for web
applications becomes harder to communicate to students
and to be able to get them to master these ideas.
Particularly as the overall structure
of building a complex web app.
Where the coding requirements increase
and so the accessibility requirements also increase
and so keeping both of those going is a big challenge.
Which kind of leads to the open question of that,
while I'm trying to sort of permeate accessibility
in the whole course, should it be made more explicit?
Is the thing that rather than just being,
Oh Yeah accessibility is important, Let's just do it.
And then kind of letting it just always
be there as sort of a low-level background,
always have to be accessible.
Or should be made more explicit and more concrete.
Like this is why we're trying to apply it in this particular way
and try to keep raising that and bringing back that idea.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Thank you, I think we're right about time.
Yeah.
Thank you.
JOEL ROSS: I think the end of my slide.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: All right, awesome.
JOEL ROSS: Cool and then links to my last slide.
So I'm good.
Thank you so much.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Thank you.
And we're on to our next speaker, Jennifer Mankoff.
JENNIFER MANKOFF: Hi, can you all hear me OK?
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Yes, I can hear you.
JENNIFER MANKOFF: Excellent.
I guess I'm the very last talk, so pretty
much everything I have to say has been said already
but maybe I'll have something new to add.
So I'm at the University of Washington as well.
I'm in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science
and Engineering and I teach a variety of--
Oh could you go to next slide, please. --of classes.
Including an undergraduate HCI class,
that is primarily about interaction programming
but has an early accessibility assignment
that then they have to carry through what they learn
and that's in Android.
And if you could go to the next slide, please.
And then I teach a Masters, a Professional Master's class
and also a PhD class, where we are focused on accessibility.
And I just wanted to say that, sort of in addition
to the many really wonderful ideas we've heard today,
there's a couple of things that we've
been playing with that I thought might be worth sharing.
So one is we have emphasized getting the students to find
first-person accounts relevant to projects that they do.
So for example, YouTube videos by people
talking about how they do this or that who have disability.
Rather than trying to hook them up with people
with disabilities to test with.
And that was a very intentional decision,
particularly in the Professional Master's class,
because I felt that the students weren't at this stage yet.
I felt they had plenty to learn from these first-person
accounts and that it was a burden to the disability
community, potentially, to have the early kinds of work
that they were doing in projects sometimes
be informed by direct interaction
unless the right opportunity arose.
Another thing that we played with in the Masters class
was actually to have them work on bug fixes for the NVDA
screen reader.
And there, what we did was that we
started by letting them pick from several entry level bugs
and then we had them write up a report
that they could submit with the bug.
And then we only allowed the best of those
to actually be submitted with a commitment for some level
of follow through with the open source community
for actually getting these bugs fixed.
And then the last thing that we really
emphasized, which I think is critical and echo some of what
Elaine Short was saying, is to really bring in a disability
studies perspective.
And in particular that is not only taught but directly used
to critique assignments and students
are designing their own things.
And the two words that I kind emphasize the most
with students and using that critique
is our agency and control.
So how can we make sure that the inventions they're developing
are not only informed by a first-person perspective,
but are directly contributing to either
giving more agency or more control to people
with disabilities.
So that's kind of all, I was going
to say about what we teach.
I guess I'll just add one other thing, which
is that we've been, in addition to doing accessibility
in the Android context, I found it very fruitful
to do things in the Arduino and 3D printing realm.
There's a lot of things that are happening in the DIY community,
to do it yourself community with 3D printing and accessibility.
And we found a lot of excitement with what kinds of things
could be invented that were physical in the world
or that would allow people to use hardware,
for example to control their iPhone
and then accomplish different tasks through Bluetooth.
So there's a lot of fun things to be done there.
And I don't have it on my slides but I'm
happy to provide links I'll add them maybe
in the slide notes to the classes that
have these assignments in them.
But what I wanted to focus on the majority today
was actually to talk about teaching accessibly.
So if we could go to the next slide.
I think about teaching accessibly from two
perspectives dynamics and statistics.
So the dynamics are things I'm sure you've heard before
or certainly have been talked about before,
like best practices for accessible teaching.
Sorry I was going to talk about statics there.
The dynamics are things that we are discovering
in our research are really critical to accessible
teaching.
And we heard about some of them today,
like being flexible with the due dates for assignments.
We have been studying students with and without disability
identities during COVID and we found
that teaching is much more accessible for all of them,
people with and people without disabilities, because
of the level of flexibility.
The fact that instructors are checking in
and the general attention to not gatekeeping student
participation in classes, not creating requirements
for participation that are about being present
rather than learning goals, which I think
is common in many classes.
And so these kinds of dynamic things
are making a really big difference
in how included people feel.
So on the next slide, some specific examples
are providing flex time so that students
can work around unpredictable events,
including unpredictable symptoms of a disability.
And I forgot to mention I have an invisible disability,
I'm a white woman with dark, curly hair.
But the disability side of this for me
has really given me a lot of insight,
in addition to the interviews we're
doing, into how often disability may not be recognized and still
have an impact.
Either on people who don't have an official diagnosis
or who maybe don't identify with a disability.
But these same kinds of accessibility actions
can help them as can help somebody who has official DRS
accommodations, for example.
Another thing that was really valuable to students
during COVID and is a good accessibility practice
is to teach using a variety of modalities, obviously
a good education in general.
And relatedly to assess using a variety of overlapping
and also different modalities, so that people
can present and learn in the ways that
make the most sense to them given
whatever they're dealing with.
And then also thinking about skills-based grading
rather than great grading on the amount of work that's done
or completion or effort.
So those are just some of the dynamics
that we observed in our studies of students that were really
helpful for accessibility.
You could go on to the next slide, please.
And I just want to say a little bit more
again about why this is so helpful to students
with and without disability identities.
So for students who are entering college,
they may not know how to advocate
for their own disability rights because it
may have been provided for them by their school
and/or their parents up until then.
People can sometimes be new to disability
or have a temporary disability.
And the ability to have a diagnosis and have DRS services
is not equitably available to all people.
There's research showing that Black students for example,
are more likely to be separated in their education
but less likely to have a diagnosis.
And diagnosis is also costly and so less available to students
from low SES groups.
And then also, there's temporary and/or situational disabilities
that come up.
And so for all of these reasons, when instructors started
creating more accessible classrooms because of COVID,
suddenly a wide variety of people
were realizing how much they benefited
from these things, who did not have any official DRS
documentation.
If we could go on to the next slide.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: You have a little more than 2 minutes
left.
JENNIFER MANKOFF: OK.
So another thing that has become really important to me
in teaching accessibly is actually
to make sure my TAs are educated about disability rights.
And we, for example, did a study showing
that the kinds of microaggressions that people
experience on many fronts are much more damaging when they
come from people who have power over your education,
like TAs and instructors.
So that's critical.
And then of course presenting accessibly
is also really important.
And then if we could go on to the next slide.
I'll just also comment that of course static stuff is also
important, like Alt text for images and accessible PDFs
and captioning.
And I just want to briefly, since I
know I'm running short on time, on the next slide
mention that they're actually a lot less common than they
should be and often only done when somebody knows they have
a blind student in the class.
But I have a child, for example, with a disability
who uses a screen reader but is not blind.
So there again, it's more common that people use screen reading
than you might think.
And it's also a lot easier to fix a slide deck
if you do it every time you update it,
than to only do it when a blind student comes
into the classroom.
The result there is often that it just
doesn't get done in a timely fashion
and the student has trouble falling along as a result.
The next slide, please.
One of the things we've done to make that easier,
is actually developed a course website
that I have a link to here, or on the next slide I think,
that is all done with markdown.
So we have done the site in Jekyll
but then we use remark for the slides
and then we're using other kinds of markdown
for diagrams and math.
And there's a hidden link to markdown,
so I have an image of the course website on the slide
and only if you're tabbing through the links
does this even come up.
And then on the very right side, you
can see an example of what the markdown for a slide deck
looks like.
And it's basically plain text.
And so this is one of the things we've
been using to make sure that everything we do is accessible
and then there's one more slide and I think I'm done.
So we are happy to share that if it's useful to anyone.
And I think that it's an interesting opportunity.
Although there are some issues with presenters,
like our blind TA has found Google Slides
to be more accessible when he's presenting.
So I'll stop there, because I know I'm really short on time.
And I want to thank you all for listening.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Perfect timing actually.
Great.
So I think we're headed to breakouts.
And I want to thank everybody, before we
leave to breakouts, so much for all of your wonderful talks.
I actually was taking a lot of notes myself.