OK, well, great.
I'm glad to see we have folks online.
Thanks for joining us today.
My name's Brianna Blaser.
I work with the DO-IT Center at the University of Washington,
and this webinar today on teaching
about universal design in engineering
is part of our Access Engineering Project.
This is brought to you with funding from the United
Engineering Foundation to think about how we are teaching
about disability, accessibility, and universal design
in engineering, so through that project,
we're doing a series of webinars like this.
Throughout this year, we will also
have a community of practice online
where we'll discuss these topics and share resources,
and we're developing some design briefs
that we will host on our website on topics related
to disability and accessibility, universal design
in engineering.
So it should be a great collection of resources
that folks can utilize, so if you're
interested in joining our community practice
or finding out more information about some
of those later events, feel free to shoot me a message via chat
or email us at doit@uw.edu.
And I'll put that in the chat as well.
So that's a little bit about our project.
I'm also going to put a link to the evaluation for today's
webinar in the chat, and I'll send it via an email
afterwards to folks who registered.
So thanks for joining us.
We're happy to have Sheryl Burgstahler with us here today.
Sheryl founded and directs the DO-IT Center and the Access
Technology Center here at the University of Washington
where she promotes the use of mainstream and assistive
technology to support the success of students
with disabilities in post-secondary education
and careers and the development of facilities, computer
labs, software, websites, multimedia,
and distance-learning programs that are welcoming
and accessible to individuals with disabilities.
Sheryl has a long history of working
in the area of universal design and education,
thinking not only about the universal design of learning,
but also thinking about how we teach about these topics,
universal design and accessibility in computing
and engineering fields.
So I'll let Sheryl take it from there.
OK.
Well, thanks for that introduction and sharing
information about our projects that this is supporting,
this webinar.
And I'll get my screen up here.
Is that showing?
How is that working?
I think you might need to confirm
first window you want to share.
Oh, I see.
I've got another button to push.
There you go.
Thanks.
Oh, here I am.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
OK, so I love to talk about universal design,
but as you'll see, I'm also very comfortable with other
terminology people use, "inclusive design"
or "user-centered design" that essentially mean the same thing
as they're used by different people.
I will share some of those, the terminology
and how I see the difference, so it must be right, right?
So I use the terms in different ways,
but other people think otherwise.
So anyway, it's not about universal design as much
as it's about all those types of practices where we're proactive
about creating-- in this case, in this class,
our presentation--
accessible products that reach a diverse audience.
I don't know why my slide isn't moving.
Oh, I don't know why it did that.
The centers that I direct at the University of Washington
are the Access Technology Center,
which I started in 1984, and it's
funded totally by the University of Washington.
In that center, we make sure that all faculty, students,
and staff have access to technology on our campus, which
includes assistive technology, specialized technology used
by people with disabilities, and accessible technology
design, where we work on websites and with computer
companies to make their products more accessible to people
with disabilities and other individuals,
a diverse population.
Then we have the DO-IT Center, and this project
is funded under the DO-IT Center.
The basic differences between those two centers
is the first one's funded by the University of Washington.
The DO-IT Center is funded by external funds,
like the grant that has supported
this particular project.
And so we started the DO-IT Center in 1992,
and it's been supported by federal, state, corporate,
and private funds since then, though the largest donor is
the National Science Foundation, where they fund grants for us
to do a variety of things, all centered
around improving the lives of people with disabilities.
We even have a DO-IT Japan Center, started in 2007,
and the US Department of Education
funded a center on universal design and education
starting in 1999.
It's an online center.
There is a reference book, and there
is a whole chapter on how to include accessibility
and disability and universal design topics
within an engineering course.
My claim to fame is not that I edited the book,
but that I recruited 40 authors and co-authors
to write articles in the book about all sorts
of different angles where you can approach universal design
to benefit students with disabilities and other students
on campus, but just to make a better world for everyone.
So you can join our email community of practice related
to universal design, but I just sent an email
to our DO-IT list, which is doit@uw.edu.
And you can join this UDHE online community of practice.
It is not a high-traffic group, but you find out
about conferences and other things around the world,
actually, in the area of universal design applications.
So as Brianna mentioned, this is our AccessEngineering
initiative that we've had funding for in various ways
for quite a few years now.
The National Science Foundation gave us a three-year grant
to pursue this work, and some other funding as well
from the National Science Foundation
has pursued this initiative.
But now, we have also funding from the United Engineering
Foundation, and in that particular grant,
it's "to advance the engineering arts
and sciences for the welfare of humanity"
is the broad statement from that funding source, which
we can all get on board regarding that, I'm sure.
So what are we looking for?
Well, we're looking for people to get engaged in our project.
We're looking for speakers for webinars on accessibility
or disability engineering.
So this is our kickoff webinar, but we're
hoping that we get some of you to offer to give a webinar.
If you don't want to give a whole one-hour webinar,
feel free to offer to give a shorter one.
Maybe we put maybe three speakers together
or two speakers together in one webinar
to share your practices or even your thoughts
on how we can be more inclusive in engineering practices
in post-secondary education.
We're looking, as Brianna mentioned,
for authors to write some design briefs on a related topic.
Maybe you've done something in a course.
It doesn't have to be entire course,
but you've implemented an activity
that's been successful.
Then Brianna can help you write that brief,
and we'll get it posted up on the internet
so others can benefit from that.
And as she mentioned, also, as we have a community of practice
related to this topic, for all of those things,
you can post a message to Brianna in the chat room,
but also just send a message to doit@uw.edu and express
your interest.
So in access engineering, we have objectives
for engineering courses to be that they'd better
serve a diverse student body that includes students
with disabilities.
We do a lot of presentations on it making a course inclusive,
and that's not the primary focus of this talk.
But it certainly is related.
And then integrate relevant disability-
and accessibility-related content within engineering
courses--
we have a broader initiative where
we talk about all types of courses,
and so how can universal design and other design approaches be
included in IT courses or education courses
or courses that are teaching you about how to design
a museum and so forth?
And then our community practice--
and then we have resources, and if you can't see the URL
on there, it's uw.edu/doit/prog rams/accessengineering.
And you can have access to these PowerPoints
after the presentation.
So I'm going to talk briefly about the evolution--
[INAUDIBLE]
--the evolution of responses to diversity.
I'm going to talk about accommodations
and universal design as the primary approaches to making
products and environments welcoming and accessible
to a broad audience that includes people
with disabilities, and then I'll talk about universal design
in the engineering curriculum.
And I'll be joined by a number of co-presenters
that will come join us via a video
at the end of this presentation, 10-minute video.
So taking a look at kind of the origins of universal design,
the whole idea is to be thinking about the diversity of students
we have in our courses, students we're
teaching, rather than looking at the average student
that we have, looking at students in our classes
that have a great variety as far as communication
skills and marital status and culture and interests,
learning styles, age, religious beliefs, race, and so on.
And some of these things are related to disability,
like their ability as far as visual abilities and learning
abilities and so forth, but there are much more
types of diversity besides disability.
But then if we zero in on ability, rather than
think of a diagnosis--
which we have very fine people on our campuses
that deal with that every day, our disability
services offices that need to know
diagnoses, medical conditions of people with disabilities.
So that's good that we do that and evaluating
what appropriate accommodations are and so forth.
But most of us, including myself,
are not in that position, and so we do not
have to memorize a lot of disability categories
and so forth.
I think it's better to just think
about all abilities on a continuum, and every one of us
is on a continuum for various characteristics we have,
from all the way on the right-hand side
of this double-edged arrow, which is able, very able, down
to not so able.
So most of us have greater ability
to see when we're very young, for instance.
Then we kind of slip toward left a little bit as we get older.
Same with hearing, the ability to walk--
we have various capabilities as far as
to manage our physical and mental health, to read print,
to write with a pen or pencil, to communicate
verbally, to tune out distraction, and to learn.
And you might look at some of these
and see a relationship between the item
and a diagnosis of a disability, like tuning out distraction.
We might think of attention deficit disorder,
but really, the only thing that really matters
is we all have some level of ability in paying attention.
And we should just prepare for a continuum
whether we're developing a class or we're developing a product.
I'd like to have a little one-minute history
lesson in case you don't think about all this stuff
as much as we do, and it's about the evolution
of the responses we have to human differences
to see where universal design fits in this continuum here.
So we have many horror stories--
mostly in the past, not exclusively--
but where people that were considered not worthy
were just eliminated from the population,
or if not eliminated, totally excluded because they
didn't fit in in some way.
Hopefully, at least in our country,
we've gone beyond this.
And the next stage was segregation,
that, well, we should include a broader range of people,
including disabilities, but it's really best
that they stay with their own kind
in a segregated environment.
And we see this particularly in the early days
of special education in our country.
In the middle of the last century,
there was a big push toward cure and rehabilitation,
and that was because there were a lot of medical miracles
that were taking place in the science of medicine.
And so there were more things we could cure,
and that if we could cure a condition,
then we could rehabilitate that person
so that they could be more functional in the environment
that we have prepared for them or for all of society.
And there was a big push in the area of rehabilitation
and accommodation also the middle of the last century,
after World War II, because for the first time,
men were returning from battle with serious multiple
disabilities that they didn't survive in earlier wars.
Not only that, but they had the GI Bill,
and so many of the veterans with multiple disabilities
ended up on our campuses.
And we more than welcomed them there.
They were war heroes, but we needed
to pay attention to how we could accommodate them
on campuses that really weren't designed for them.
And so there was a big push on accommodations.
After civil rights movements of all efforts,
and included in that was a civil rights movement for people
with disabilities, we look more toward social justice,
and in that view, people with different characteristics,
including disabilities, just have a right
to be here on our campuses, have a right
to use products that we create.
And that led to inclusion, which is
a step beyond special education, for instance,
and really fully including people with disabilities
in all that we do.
And to make that happen, it became apparent
that we couldn't just accommodate them,
and to make very inaccessible activities and products
accessible to them, we really needed
to think about proactive design, or "universal design"
as we're calling it in this talk.
So, on our campuses the typical approach is accommodation.
What I'm meaning here as far as an accommodation is something
that adjusts a product--
it could be a website or an engineering lab
or something, a product or an environment.
It could be an environment, a physical environment
or an online environment-- to provide access
to a specific person.
So a person signs up to take a course
or get engaged in some activity, and we
might find through our disability services office
that they require extra time, alternative formats
of documents, sign language interpreters, et cetera.
And so that's an accommodation where
we make an accommodation for a particular person
because what we have created ahead of time
is not accessible to them.
But sometimes, it's more important to look
at the design of the product or the environment first
to reconsider that.
Maybe the design isn't very accommodating
to people with a wide variety of characteristics.
I like to show this image of the coffeepot
for masochists out of the Catalog of Unfindable Objects,
which is no longer in print, but it's
a fun book to read in The Psychology of Everyday Things.
Whoa, that's kind of strange.
But anyway, this particular image--
what it speaks to me is sometimes a product
is just not designed very well.
And I think if we gave people this coffee pot to serve coffee
with the spout and the handle on the same side,
it would be a shock if people didn't
complain about the product rather than look to us
and say, well, if you just kind of took the lid off and poured
it out the side, maybe that would work.
We need to look at the product first and make
sure it's a good design and in the case of universal design,
make sure it's a good design for a lot of people.
So universal design was defined by the Center on Universal
Design as "the design of products and environments
to be usable by all people to the greatest
extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized
design."
It doesn't mean that we won't need adaptations.
It means that we should shoot for not needing adaptations
for most people.
And notice again, here, it repeats this.
It could be a product.
It could be an environment, but our goal
is to make it usable by a broad range of people.
Universal design I consider to be a combination of three
types of design.
It needs to be accessible, which means
a person with disabilities can actually access it in some way.
But even more important, it needs
to be usable, that the person can actually
use it for this function it was developed for.
And it should be inclusive, so we're not segregating people.
So a piece of software that is technically accessible using
maybe a special shortcut keys for a person who's blind,
for instance, would be accessible to that person,
but if we would expect that person
to memorize or have at hand a hundred different shortcut
combinations to access the features
that other people would access, that's not usable.
That's not usable for that person.
And if the product that we create isolates the person--
so they're using a whole different product
than someone else to perform a function that
maybe is happening in a group setting in class--
then it's not inclusive.
So other terminology for proactive design
include "inclusive design."
I actually like that word, that terminology.
One problem with it in post-secondary environments
is "inclusion" is a topic used for special education.
It has a different meaning in K-12 education, where
we basically accommodate any child that
is in our country, where in higher education,
we have other requirements for them to be qualified to take
a class and attend our college.
"Accessible design" is very similar.
It's proactive, but it tends to emphasize accessibility
for people with disabilities, rather than a broader
population, where "universal design" could include,
for instance, English-language learners and others that
don't have disabilities.
"Usable design" I just described.
People can actually use it effectively.
I think we've all engaged with products
that aren't very useful.
We can't figure out what to do.
And then there's "universal design,"
which is arguably the most general
or the broadest-focused.
"Barrier-free" design is often used overseas in other
countries to mean either "universal design,"
or sometimes, it means "accessible design."
And "design for all"--
all of the times I've seen that used, it's equivalent
to "universal design."
"Ability-based design" is often used where you analyze
abilities and design accordingly,
and so it can mean the same thing as "universal design."
But sometimes, it's used more narrowly,
where the person might just take one person
and their abilities-- and that's sometimes called "user-centered
design" as well--
and not broadly consider accessibility and usability
for other populations, so but they're all proactive design.
The basic principles of the universal design are equitable
use-- everybody can use it--
flexibility in use, simple and intuitive,
perceptible information-- a microwave
oven with little tiny characters on the buttons
is not going to be very accessible to someone
with a visual disability, for example.
Tolerance for error-- we all know about this.
When you make a mistake in a software package
and it just tells you that's a mistake
and it doesn't give you any guidance for what to do next,
not very tolerant for the errors I just made.
And low physical effort-- unless you're creating a product where
you want people to exert physical effort--
and size and space for approach and use--
for that one, for instance, a non-disability example
would be to consider people are right-handed and left-handed,
and are you creating a product that is usable by both groups?
So I mentioned earlier, you can apply universal design
to create inclusive physical spaces.
You can look at technology-- we'll look at that a bit here--
services, learning activities, and so on.
It can be applied to any product or environment.
It's not new.
The terminology may be new, but it's not new.
Back in the '70s--
1970 in this particular case-- here's
on the front page of The Daily at the University
of Washington.
And here we have a man in a wheelchair,
and the sign on the back of his wheelchair
says, "Ramp the curbs.
Get me off the street."
And this was at the University of Washington,
where I'm sure many people were saying, ramping the curbs?
Curb cuts?
Are you kidding me?
We had so many hills here.
There's no way that that would be broadly adopted
as a practice.
And now we think nothing of it as people use curb cuts
as they're pushing their baby strollers or their delivery
carts or even skateboards.
That's not so cool, maybe, but anyway, we have adopted that.
And so we're looking in our project and other efforts
to do it in adopting universal design or accessible
practices more broadly in a lot of different ways.
Universal design provides inclusive access.
I mentioned that earlier, and I want to emphasize this.
Just as a quick example in the physical environment,
we have two images here.
One is the typical modern building with two steps--
walk into the main entrance--
and then immediately to the left, I'm sure,
ADA-compliant ramp, and so what's wrong with that?
It's accessible, quite usable, but it's not fully inclusive.
When I walk up to that building with someone
who is in a wheelchair, we part ways, and believe me,
I've tried it the other way and go up
walking in front of that person or behind that person.
Either way, it is very awkward, and so we may be
in the middle of conversation.
They go off to the left.
I go up the steps, and we meet again at the top.
Again, it's accessible.
It's usable.
It's not inclusive.
On the right-hand side, we have a picture
of another building on our campus,
and this one has a gradual slope into the building.
And the walkway is quite wide, so I
would be able to walk side by side with the same person.
And we go in the building entrance together.
By the way, there are still steps if you want to use step,
but the default, the main entrance to the building
is accessible, usable, and inclusive.
So that's what I mean by "inclusive."
Just a couple examples, like if we take a video
and put captions on the video, which we promote as a best
practice, it benefits many more people
than just people who are unable to hear the audio.
People who are English-language learners--
we have a program in Japan I mentioned.
Most of the people in presentations I give
can read the English captions quite well.
They have more difficulty understanding people speaking
English than writing English.
Then if it's people in a noisy environment like the airport,
in a noiseless location like in the library
or when your baby's sleeping and you want to watch a video--
it benefits people who have a slow internet connection.
They want to know the spelling of words,
or they need to search through the text quickly
to find content maybe in multiple videos,
but go directly to the content they're looking for.
So again, universal design--
it benefits a lot of people, but it
can be inspired by what could have
been considered an accommodation for a person with a disability.
If we look at technology, our smartphones
are great examples of how they build
in accessibility features.
My only complaint is my phone talks to me too much.
Out of the blue, it starts talking to me,
and so I can't get it to stop sometimes.
But I think that's user error there.
Maybe it's not usable enough.
But anyway, you can change the background color to black
so your text is on white.
Again, you can use voice.
They are generally totally accessible to people
who are blind.
But once in a while, there are features that will never really
build into technology for good reason, for instance,
a Braille embosser that a person can use
to create Braille documents.
I don't think we're going to find that those devices hanging
off of our smartphones, but as we design technology,
we want to make sure that it is compatible
with assistive technology people might be using.
Just like now when you're designing a website
at a post-secondary institution, you take special care
to make sure it's accessible to someone
using mobile phone or other mobile devices.
I'll give you three examples of people
that the design of your products might benefit
and what technology they use.
Anthony is an assistive technology specialist
at Prentke Romich Company.
They develop and distribute assistive technology for people
with disabilities.
He has cerebral palsy that affects his ability to speak.
He has very little ability to speak.
He does have some motor skills, but not fine motor skills,
but he can use a touch screen.
He also has a learning disability,
so he uses grammar and spell checkers, like many of us do.
He has a synthesized voice on his communication device, which
is attached to his wheelchair.
He uses a touch screen, and he uses
computer-based environmental control and phone access.
He provides a lot of phone access
in his job, phone support to people
that are using the products or deciding to use products
that his company distributes.
And it kind of brings a smile to my face
to think of Anthony, who many people would point out
as someone who would be great for doing phone support--
does phone support, and I'm sure that it's
reassuring to parents of children newly diagnosed
with conditions similar to his own
that learn that this young man is gainfully employed
in a high-tech business.
Nicole-- she has a bachelor's degree
in computer science from Stanford.
We tried to get her to go here at our university,
but they made a better offer.
She works at Google now.
She is blind.
She uses speech output, so her computer speaks to her.
She uses Braille translation software and a Braille display
and printer so that she can produce hard copy.
She also has a regular printer if she
wants to share what she wants to share with people
that use regular print.
And so she could be on our campuses
or using our products that are being developed.
And then there's Jessie.
She has a bachelor's degree in informatics
and a master's in business administration
from the University of Washington,
and she's a manager of fraud prevention at Amazon.
She has multiple learning disabilities.
She uses speech output, so it helps her to be able to--
she can read, but she can hear as she's reading someone
speaking that text as well.
She also uses speech input, and so she'll
dictate memos and so forth.
It's easier for her to get her thoughts
into the computer that way, and then she uses grammar and spell
checkers.
She used those to get through college and also in her job
today.
So people have a wide range of characteristics,
some called disabilities, that we
need to think about whenever we're designing something.
So one of the comments I get from people
who want to include accessibility in their courses,
quite often from engineering and IT faculty--
they just don't know that much about assistive technology,
so they don't get comfortable teaching anything
about accessibility issues.
But how much do you really need to know?
I don't like to make light of it,
and it's a really exciting field.
But there are thousands of assistive devices
that people with disabilities might use, and they change.
They develop every day into new technologies.
So you can learn a lot about the assistive technology part
through videos.
We have a series of videos on our DO-IT website
that does that very thing, and it features people
with disabilities talking about the technology they use.
You could use a presentation by an assistive technology
expert on your campus.
Many people have the accessible technology center
that I mentioned that we have here,
and if not a whole center, they have people
that know about accessibility.
Even your disability services office
might have someone that comes speak to your class.
Or they can also help you line up
a panel of students with different types of disabilities
to speak in your class about the technology they use
and what challenges they face in using
mainstream technology, given the disability that they have.
And then there's a collection of success stories
up on our websites and so forth, so you
can learn about the lives of people with disabilities.
I really like the panel the best,
and actually, I'll put in a plug here.
We actually have funding, not through the current project,
but through other means to actually pay
$50 to any student that will come and be
on a panel for a course here on our campus
or on other campuses.
It has to have something to do with technology, engineering,
and IT.
But anyway, if you contact your disability services office
and they could send out a message
or you could compose a message that they would send out
recruiting people to be on a panel for your class,
you could offer them $50.
It's not a lot of money, but it's just a little token
of our appreciation.
And they would just like to fill out a very simple form,
and we would pay them directly so you don't
have to get involved in that.
So again, that's something that you could email us about
and say you'd like us to do that.
Again, we'd like to make sure students with disabilities
are told even in this modest way that what they have learned
is a benefit to other people and the work that we do.
Another way to look at it is, what are the limitations
of assistive technology that we need
to be aware of on the other side when we're developing something
to interface with it?
Well, assistive technology-- you can just
be sure that there are thousands of alternative keyboards,
and some of them are on screen.
And they have switches, and you can operate them
with your feet.
Or there's one called an eyebrow wrinkle switch
that you could operate.
Sometimes, you can give Morse code to the computer
to give the commands that you want to give.
The thing to remember is that technology, you can be sure,
will fully emulate the keyboard, but not necessarily the mouse.
So what that means when you're designing technology, at least,
or you're interfacing with some technology,
is make sure that whatever commands you're given
or input you're using with the mouse
can also be accomplished with the keyboard.
Typically, it means using the arrow keys
to move around the screen or to select something,
to move from one item to another.
So think keyboard, that you want everything
that you do, this interface for the computer,
to be operable with the keyboard.
You don't have to worry about how people are getting there,
but that's what their technology will be able to do.
It obviously can't read content presented in images.
It just sees an image.
It can't read the words that are in there if they are embedded
in an image, like a PDF document that is essentially
just a scanned image.
So all that means is you have to provide text
so that a screen reader, for example, could read it,
and that could be for a student with a learning disability
or someone who is blind.
And so we provide alternative text and images,
let's say, in a document or on a website,
but first, try to make everything in text
from the beginning.
A screen reader can tab from link to link on a website,
so if you put Click Here, Click Here, Click Here
for all of your department websites,
that's what a person who's blind is going
to read if they skip from link to link to get
a sense of what's on the page.
And so you then have required that they go back and read
the entire page so they can see the descriptive wording
around the links.
Rather than have that problem, just describe your links,
so you might put DO-IT Website as the link description
so someone looking at that from their screen reader
will know where they're going.
Similarly, the screen readers can
skip from heading to heading, and all this means
is that when we're creating a document,
we should structure with the hierarchical headings structure
when we're creating a document.
And it cannot describe audio, and so we need to caption
our videos.
And we need to transcribe any audio
that we are using in our products,
so that gives you a rundown.
So what's universal design?
I think of it as an attitude that values diversity, equity,
and inclusion.
It's a goal, but it's also a process, a proactive process.
It may never be reached, but we should always
be shooting for it.
It can be implemented incrementally, so in a class,
you can have students address some issues related
to universal design, but not necessarily all of them,
and they could still have a good experience.
It focuses on benefits to everyone,
promotes best practices, does not reduce your practices--
it should promote best practices--
does not lower your standards, and minimizes
the need for accommodations.
So that's what universal design is about.
But where is accessibility or universal design or anything
covered in our curriculum and textbooks?
Well, from what I hear and what I observe,
it's not covered very commonly in textbooks.
So these textbooks happen to be about computing on the screen
right now, and then way the right-hand side,
there's one on web accessibility.
So you'll find a few books on the topic,
but it's not generally included in the content,
the main content.
So why might you want to teach universal design?
Well, it could be to reach diverse audiences.
Maybe you'd just like to have your product more marketable
to a broad audience.
There's disability-related legislation.
For instance, some institutions like ours,
post-secondary institutions, are required
to use accessible products, like software, for example.
And so when you're creating a product that's not accessible,
you're putting them at legal risk.
It's not illegal to create an inaccessible product,
but in some cases, it can be not in compliance with the law
if you're purchasing that, so think about your customers.
Ethics-- it's just an ethical thing or social justice,
as we talked about, the idea that if you
work on accessibility, it will likely benefit everyone
to some degree.
And there are emerging standards,
like the ABET standards that I'll
mention or I'll show you in a minute, that require or suggest
that engineering departments and IT departments
include accessibility topics.
And there's demand from companies.
Teach Access is an effort.
It's led by Microsoft and Dropbox and Adobe and LinkedIn,
many companies.
They cannot find enough people that know about accessibility,
and so they're going out to post-secondary institutions
and talking to engineering and computer science faculty
members to beg them to teach about accessibility
in their courses.
So ABET I mentioned, the accreditation board
for post-secondary engineering and computing programs--
this is relatively new wording that they
have put as they talk about engineering design.
"Engineering design is the process
of devising a system, component, or process
to meet desired needs and specifications
within constraints.
Examples of possible constraints include accessibility,
aesthetics, constructability, cost, ergonomics,
functionality, interoperability, legal considerations,
maintainability, manufacturability, policy,
regulations, schedule, sustainability, usability."
And so what ABET is encouraging is
to teach about these topics, about possible constraints
as an important part of the curriculum,
and I highlighted a few-- accessibility, ergonomics,
legal considerations, usability--
that are directly related to universal design
and disability-related issues.
So it can actually help your departments
meet their ABET requirements.
There's another part of ABET that actually also says
that physical environments used in engineering and computer
science should be accessible, so this
would include maker spaces.
Is it physically accessible to someone using a wheelchair
or use a walker or whatever?
So that's a whole different area.
We actually have a number of handouts,
and one of is on how to design an accessible maker space.
So as far as universal design of instruction-- again,
we're not talking about this so much today,
but just to touch on it briefly is the overall design
of your instruction, so planning for multiple ways
for your students to gain knowledge and demonstrate
knowledge and engage and making sure
that the tools that you use are accessible to students
with disabilities.
So if you're using a 3D printer, is
it on an adjustable table, for instance,
that might make it accessible to someone from a wheelchair
height?
The way you deliver content--
so different teaching techniques--
are you adjusting to students with a wide variety
of abilities?
And the way you engage students in learning--
having multiple ways to engage-- some students
might not be able to engage well in a class setting,
but do better one-on-one.
And again, they might do better online,
so you provide multiple ways where they can engage with you.
In your syllabus, encouraging people
to meet with you for office hours,
do you say in there that-- well, and you can
choose how you want to meet.
Could be one-on-one using Zoom, or it could be in the classroom
or in the office.
It could be via email for some students.
They don't have to give a reason.
They can just say how they'd like to engage with you.
And then the way you assess student knowledge,
assessing it in multiple ways--
but the last one on here most related
what we're talking about here is your choice of course content,
and that could include including universal design.
There's one study that's done in computing
and IS, but has some implications for engineering
as well, and it's a study about who
teaches accessibility, a survey of US computing faculty.
And Kristen Shinohara and Saba Kawas--
I got that wrong, I think--
Andrew Ko and Richard Ladner are the authors,
and it's in the 2018 Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical
Symposium on Computer Science Education.
So they sampled faculty at four-year institutions
and colleges in computer science and information science
and other interdisciplinary computing departments,
so some engineering was involved in that part.
One of the first questions they asked is how many
are teaching accessibility, and in their sample, which
has its reservations, of course, you
have to take with a grain of salt,
but it was 20% of the people they surveyed
are teaching accessibility.
It was their expectation that maybe more people who do teach
would respond to the survey, which is often a weakness,
but a fair number of people were actually
teaching about accessibility.
So what were their learning objectives?
To understand technology barriers,
they reported, so just understanding
what challenges there are, understanding design concepts.
And so it gave them opportunities
to talk about user-centered design and participatory
design and universal design and so forth.
To engage diverse populations, to evaluate web accessibility
standards and heuristics, to develop accessible web
technologies, to employ design techniques,
to understand legal regulations, such as the Americans
with Disabilities Act--
what does that mean for potential clients
once they're out in the work world?
I think many faculty would be surprised at that,
at what ADA does require.
Understand models of disability, views
of disability as being a social issue or a medical issue
and so forth-- it can be very informative--
and employ accessibility-focused languages and tools--
there are actually some computer languages
that are accessible to people with a broad range
of disabilities that computer science faculty might
want to teach about.
Some of their challenges-- that was the second part
of the survey--
to incorporating accessibility-- not too surprising--
is it's not a core part of curriculum,
and we all know that it's hard to fit in everything that you
need to do already.
They worry that they don't know enough to teach it.
There's no appropriate textbook that includes it.
There's a lack of awareness of faculty members, lack
of support for topics addressing real challenges for people
with disabilities.
I'm not sure if this is from the department or institution,
but that was one thing that was reported.
Difficulty engaging students, which
is a surprise because we usually hear the opposite,
that students become quite engaged in accessibility topics
once they learn about what they are, and lack
of a demand in the industry--
and we're finding there's more and more demand,
as I mentioned.
We employ student helpers in our computer lab, and some of them
are getting jobs now because they've
learned about accessibility, that it probably wasn't
the only reason they got a job.
But it contributed to them getting a job
in high-tech fields, and it's difficult to recruit people
with disabilities on panels and so forth.
What do faculty need?
They say they need help with connections to people
with disabilities to interact with one-on-one
or to bring into the classroom.
Again, your best source is probably
the disability services office.
They will not give you names of people with disabilities,
but they almost always have a distribution mechanism
where they can share your message and recruit as
long as a student then is free to choose
to get in contact with you.
They need tools, technologies, guidelines, problem examples,
curricular examples for specific courses--
and we're working on that in a number of areas,
including engineering-- and then training
and other opportunities to gain expertise.
We do a lot of presentations at conferences,
and that's one way they can learn about this.
There are career benefits for students
with disabilities, I mean, for students in general.
These IT companies, as I mentioned that they're really
pushing for this-- and our student workers
within an Access Technology lab have secured jobs
in part because of this knowledge,
so it's actually a benefit to the students as well.
They can put it on their resume.
And the student interest, we find, is there.
Here's one quote from a student.
"I would be interested in seeing units
on designing accessible products.
I might seek out a course like this,"
and this is from someone-- or at least
there are others in that group-- that
had not had any accessibility training in the courses
that they took.
Another student said, "I think the reason
for many accessibility-related issues in today's technologies
is because it isn't being taught.
If it isn't taught, folks go on to create things
without this awareness, resulting
in inaccessible technologies."
Right on.
So I promised that I would have some co-presenters here,
and they are going to come via video.
So we'll have a short video on including universal design
in engineering curriculum, and so here we go.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Including universal design in the engineering curriculum.
By including accessibility and universal design
in the engineering curriculum, you're
making a statement to all the students
that you're teaching that the perspective and the needs
of people with disabilities is something
that they need to think about, whether they're
engineering specifically for that group
or for any other group.
I think it's really important that we train our new engineers
to be versed in the area of universal design
and accessibility so that when they create products
for the companies that they will work for,
they'll be accessible and usable by people with disabilities
and individuals with all kinds of different characteristics.
As a creator of technology, you have the onus
and responsibility to address the needs
of a variety of end users.
Universal design and related frameworks,
such as inclusive design, ability-based design,
and human-centered design, encourage
engineers to be proactive in considering
the abilities of diverse users.
Universal design is defined by the Center for Universal Design
at North Carolina State University
as "the design of products and environments
to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible,
without the need for adaptation or specialized design."
Universal design requires engineers
to question any assumptions a design makes about its users.
Engineering students who understand these concepts
enter the workforce prepared to design
for a wide variety of users.
So just as we teach safety and material property and dynamics
within our engineering curriculum,
incorporating universal design can
ensure that our future engineers consider those small design
tweaks and consider the breadth of the population
in their design and future innovations.
Asking, is this accessible or what
are the accessibility implications, that
is a practice that can follow them
throughout their engineering career.
Engineer Billy Price used his own life experience
as a person with quadriplegia to design a line of shoes.
It's an example of universal design.
I don't have the ability to tie laces,
and I know when it comes to laces,
a common solution out there is to use Velcro.
But even if you overcome the laces,
you still have the physical issue
of jamming your foot into the shoe.
So staring at my feet for 18 years--
in other words, like half a lifetime
of not being able to put my shoes on--
I knew there had to be a better solution.
The shoe that we've created, yes, it
has adaptive characteristics, but we're not
marketed as an adaptive shoe.
It's a shoe that's trendy.
It's a shoe that everyone's going to want to wear.
It's a shoe that will be in all the stores
so anyone can buy it.
The shoes have a unique zipper that runs along
the outside edge of the shoe.
It opens like a clam shell.
There are opportunities for universal design in thousands
of consumer products and built environments
that engineers helped to design and build.
Addressing these needs can improve
the lives of individuals with disabilities
and the general population.
Engineering educators can help prepare their students
to design for diverse abilities by introducing accessibility
or universal design topics in a variety of ways.
You could do maybe just part of a lecture,
or you could just do one lecture on it
or several lectures, not a whole course.
And then the third option is just
to develop a whole course on accessibility, universal
design.
In a classroom when you're having a design challenge,
if you think about, could somebody
who's older and has arthritis use this thing
you're designing?
Could a pregnant woman use this thing you've just created?
Start asking those questions of--
could somebody who's colorblind use this?
You're actually thinking about a more broad population,
and it's an easy way to sneak some ideas
about universal design and creating
a product that's more widely usable into what
you're designing.
University of Washington's Terrill Thompson
created a web design curriculum for high school students
that integrates accessibility into design considerations.
Kids are learning to code web pages using all the languages
that you use to code web pages--
HTML and CSS and JavaScript--
and they learn very early on some core design principles,
one of which is the need for accessible design.
And so they learn how people with disabilities
access computers and access to the web
and what some of the challenges they face are.
And then as they're learning new techniques
throughout the course, they learn
or they're sort of taught to ask, how does this technique
affect accessibility?
But there are other ways that faculty
can teach about disability, accessibility,
and universal design in their courses.
I think capstone courses--
the purpose of them is to allow students
to apply the skills that they've learned
in a real-world situation, and so it
can be a great opportunity for students to, first of all,
understand that accessibility and universal design
can address real-world problems, but also
to allow the students to put some of the skills
that they've learned into practice.
I teach our senior design course,
which is a common yearlong course for engineering students
that they take in their final year of their undergraduate,
and that really is a natural place for integrating topics
of accessibility and universal design.
We have students working on projects
from designing an electric skateboard to figuring out
the next medical product that can prevent collapsed lungs.
And then all of these components of universal design
can enter to help them do user testing on a diverse set
of users, consider how small changes in their design
can increase access or make a device easier to use.
Often a design tweak that, for example, might make it easier
for an individual with a visual impairment or someone who
has limited dexterity will actually
make the product easier for everyone to use,
and so we inject universal design into our curriculum
to encourage them to explore lots of different design spaces
and hopefully ultimately have a better design.
In my class, I teach a biomechanics class,
and we talk about momentum and linear and angular momentum.
And I demonstrate how I use momentum
to swing my arm to get my hand up
onto the joystick of my wheelchair,
and so it's kind of--
try to incorporate those type of examples in class.
Giving students opportunities to meet and interact
with people with disabilities is a great way
to include it in the curriculum.
We found that the students learn so much
through just having a space to sit down and talk frankly
about issues surrounding accessibility, disability,
and some of the societal implications.
By teaching accessibility and universal design
in engineering courses, faculty are
producing engineers who can succeed in a competitive job
market because they will be equipped to create products
that are widely accessible to users with diverse abilities.
Instructors can get started by including
a panel of individuals with diverse abilities,
helping students to consider universal design
and address disability-related issues in design projects,
requiring that students adhere to accessibility guidelines
when they create user interfaces or websites.
If we want accessible society with innovation
that includes accessibility, then students
need to be taught about universal design
and accessibility.
To learn more about how you can incorporate
accessibility and universal design in engineering--
[END PLAYBACK]
OK, one last slide here--
have any questions popped up you could think of?
If you want to ask questions, you can type them in the chat.
Sheryl, you mentioned this a little bit,
but maybe you could say a little bit more
about students' reactions to these topics.
I think people--
I often go out to these panels with students, not real often,
but we have people who are on campus.
And people, when in class, for instance,
when we bring in a group of maybe four students
with different types of disabilities,
at first, they're very quiet.
I think people often feel like they're
going to say the same thing.
For whatever reason, multiple reasons, disability
is an uncomfortable issue, and it is certainly something
we don't talk about a lot.
But the panelists, because of their reaction
and their willingness to share, make them--
I can just feel the audience getting more and more
comfortable with it.
The other thing I noticed with students,
particularly in engineering, is there is this tendency--
and I think is a tendency, maybe, of young engineers--
to jump to a solution before you're listening to the user.
We have one panelist that's often
on panels that has one arm.
She's missing the other arm, and she doesn't have legs.
And we went to an engineering graduate course.
We did a panel, and I happened to facilitate that panel.
And the one of the engineering students
said-- and these are graduate students.
They said, well, what kind of features
would you like to have on a prosthetic arm?
And she said, well, I'm not really
interested in prosthetic arm.
And anyway, it was this great conversation,
but the engineers-- several of them
kept coming back with, what about artificial legs?
How would you use those?
And she came back very firmly.
She'd actually tried many of these devices,
and she really likes her power wheelchair.
It doesn't break down very often,
and it moves really fast.
It doesn't make a lot of energy, and that gets her
where she needs to be.
And she really prefers to use low-tech things,
and she began to share some tools she uses to wash her hair
and do other tasks.
So it isn't like she's averse to technology,
but we have to be careful to not assume that
just because someone is missing a limb that they
want another limb.
They might want some other device,
so I think the biggest advice I give students
is to be open-minded about it.
But you need people on the panel that
are willing to talk about a lot of topics.
I prepare the group by saying, there's no question off-limits.
And if a person doesn't want to answer the question,
that's their prerogative, and they can tell you that.
But you can ask any question.
Here's another question, Sheryl.
What are some strategies to convince faculty members
to embrace universal design?
Scott says he's found that some faculty
members don't seem interested.
Yeah, they don't seem interested.
That's true.
The best way to reach faculty is to hear from other faculty,
frankly.
If you look at our engineering--
mechanical engineering, in particular--
and computer science departments,
there's a lot of interest there, but it's because of people like
Richard Ladner and Kat Steele that were just in this video--
is being so proactive.
Sometimes, you can use your students.
Kat and colleagues started a group
of students interested in designing accessible products,
including toys for children and things,
and so I think baby-stepping it, but a faculty member
that could speak at a faculty meeting
to talk about it in terms that those faculty members
would understand.
But also, the second thing is make it clear
you don't have to become an expert on--
like I was talking earlier-- about assistive technology
in order to do this.
And a lot of the conversations, as Kat
was talking in the video, can be exploratory.
It's not like you have to become an expert at something new.
It's, well, would a person who's blind be able to do this?
And is there something that maybe we
could modify this a little bit that maybe they could actually
do this?
They don't have to come up always with the final solution.
And the other is to listen to people with disabilities,
but also, be careful that one person with a disability cannot
speak for the whole group.
I have a person who has a master's degree in computer
science who works for me, and he does
accessible-user interfaces.
He's totally blind, and he uses a screen reader.
Having him test your product for accessibility
is good because he has skills in that area,
but it's also good to remember that most people are not
able to use a screen reader like he does.
He's a real power user, and we also
need to make products that someone who's just learning
to use that technology can access what
they can do with the product.
Well, great.
We are just about at our time, so thanks, everybody,
for joining us today.
And thanks, Sheryl, for giving this presentation.
Again, there's a link in the chat for the evaluation
as well as a way to email us if you want to get more involved.
Thanks for coming.
I hope some of you volunteer to do one of these.