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People with Disabilities in Computing 

Presenter: Richard Ladner

Computing fields need more people with disabilities because their expertise and perspectives spark innovation. By increasing access to include more people with disabilities in postsecondary and workplace settings, we allow a substantial group—15 percent of the world’s population—the ability to participate and create these innovations. Though there are many people with disabilities already succeeding in computing education and careers, these numbers are still much lower than their representation in the general population.

The World Health Organization defines disability not as a health problem, but by an individual’s ability to interact with the environment and the social barriers that prevent these individuals from fully participating in society. While K-12 education in the US has made great strides in including people with disabilities, only ten percent of college students and four percent of graduate students have disabilities.

Innovations that allow access to people with disabilities often become technology utilized by the wider population. Examples of this include personal texting, speech recognition, and video chat. Personal texting and picture phone were both originally created in the 1960’s for deaf people to communicate over distances; speech recognition was originally created for people who could not type easily. Many people now use these technologies daily (e.g., iOS’s Siri). Disability and technology innovation are intertwined, and more mainstream technology products have accessibility features built-in.

Barriers to access can be attitudinal as well as physical. Throughout the years, people with disabilities have been excluded, institutionalized, and eventually accommodated, which is still a reactive approach.  We encourage a universal design mindset, a proactive approach that considers the needs of all people with varying levels of abilities from the beginning stages of design. This can include having multiple options so each student can learn and interact in the method that works best for them, as well as information technology that works with a wide range of assistive technologies.

Accessibility should be taught in all computing classes. Within the computing industry, there is demand for this knowledge and the innovation results from being proactive with regards to accessibility. Many companies are now requiring their employees to know accessibility principles and best practices. ABET, which sets the standards for engineering departments, now includes accessibility in their criteria.

To learn more about teaching accessibility, visit teachaccess.org. To learn more about various students with disabilities already studying and working in the computing field, visit the ChooseComputing profiles at .

Accommodations and Universal Design

Presenter: Sheryl Burgstahler

Ability exists on a continuum, where all individuals are more or less able to see, hear, walk, read print, communicate verbally, tune out distractions, learn, or manage their health. In K-12 education in the United States, every child is ensured a free, appropriate education in as integrated of a setting as possible. However, in postsecondary education, students must meet whatever course or program requirements apply and are offered reasonable accommodations as needed. 

Accommodations and universal design (UD) are two approaches to access for people with disabilities. Both approaches contribute to the success of students with disabilities in computing classes. Accommodations are a reactive process, providing access for a specific student and arise from a medical model of disability. Students might be provided with extra time on tests, books in alternate formats, note takers, sign language interpreters, or other adjustments. 

In contrast, UD is a proactive process rooted in a social justice approach to disability and is beneficial to all students. UD is designing products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design. A UD approach can benefit people who face challenges related to socioeconomic status, race, culture, gender, age, language, or ability. 

UD of instruction is an attitude that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. It can be implemented incrementally, focuses on benefits to all students, promotes good teaching practice, does not lower academic standards, and minimizes the need for accommodations. UD can be applied to all aspects of instruction, including class climate, interactions, physical environments and products, delivery methods, information resources and technology, feedback, and assessment. Examples include the following:

• Arranging seating so that everyone has a clear line of sight.
• Avoiding stigmatizing a student by drawing undue attention to a difference.
• Using large, bold fonts with high contrast on uncluttered overhead displays and speak aloud all content.
• Providing multiple ways to gain and demonstrate knowledge.
• Avoiding unnecessary jargon; defining terms.
• Providing scaffolding tools (e.g., outlines).
• Providing materials in accessible formats.
• Providing corrective opportunities.
• Testing in the same manner in which you teach.
• Minimizing time constraints as appropriate.

Designing websites to include text alternatives for graphics, present context via text and visuals, include captions and transcripts for all video and audio content, ensure that all content and navigation can be reached with the keyboard alone, and spell out acronyms.

Educators who effectively apply UD and provide accommodations level the playing field for students with disabilities and make instruction welcoming to, accessible to, and usable by all students. They minimize, but do not eliminate, the need for accommodations.

Presentation and Discussion: How Can We Include Topics of Accessibility in the Computing Curriculum?

Presenter: Amy Ko, UW

When we talk about curricular change, it can start with an instructor changing how they teach a course. However, this change doesn’t just happen out of nowhere—it comes from faculty members thinking about what to teach their students and finding better ways to educate. There are many barriers to change, including curriculum that doesn’t need updating, faculty not having enough time, no room for more topics in the class, no room for more classes in the curriculum, or instructors who don’t have the expertise to teach a particular topic, like accessibility. 

We hired three lecturers to teach Information 343: Client-Side Web Development, and I asked them to rework the existing curriculum to include accessibility. In order to do this, we trained these lecturers on web accessibility, and asked them to think of how they could include the information in their courses. Ultimately, one instructor realized they could redesign the lesson that covered markup to include information about web accessibility. This not only incorporated the information, but also served to make the lesson on markup more compelling. This instructor committed to teaching the new markup lesson over the summer. In order to encourage him, I checked in on a regular basis.  This new lesson worked well and was engaging for students. Other instructors implemented this content subsequently. As a result, a year later we have trained 200 web developers who now know web accessibility basics.

Now, it isn’t always this easy to include accessibility topics within course curriculum. We had several things working in our favor:

• The iSchool has a strong culture of continuous improvement in learning outcomes and student engagement in the iSchool.
• We had a team of instructors already in the habit of improving their instruction every quarter reinforced these values.
• We focused on reaching out to lecturers whose only job was teaching and whose course load was structured to account for course improvement efforts.
• I was incentivized by my (funded) participation in AccessComputing to champion this change.
• The instructor creatively identified a weak part of the course material that could be improved with accessibility content.
• We modified content rather than adding new content.
• We identified an existing, required, well-liked course rather than proposing a new course.
• Accessibility is already taught in other courses throughout the undergraduate and graduate curricula, so it wasn’t viewed as a “new” topic.
• The instructors already had exposure to content from their professional experiences as software developers.
• Having an in-house accessibility expert made it easy to do a quick training, giving the instructors confidence in the material.

You can facilitate change by identifying a champion (whether this is you or someone else in your department), surveying your landscape for incentives and capacity for change, creating sufficient incentives and capacity, finding the person most motivated to change and manage their change, and repeating these steps as necessary. There should also be some long term thought to including accessibility, and adding scheduled time to check that the efforts put forward are not forgotten or waylaid. 

I asked participants “How can we include topics of accessibility in the computing curriculum, and what are ways to incentivize and motivate faculty to include accessibility?” Their responses included the following:

• Some people know about accessibility and some people don’t—and if a professor doesn’t know anything about accessibility, they won’t teach it. Raising awareness and providing resources can mitigate this potential barrier.
• Looking at specific courses and making small changes to include accessibility in them.
• Bringing awareness to how accessibility is newly included in ABET accreditation standards may help to motivate faculty.
• Engaging tenure-track faculty who have the most power for encouraging curricular change.
• With more computing jobs requiring accessibility, motivate faculty by showcasing what companies are looking for and the tools students need to be successful in computing careers.

IT Accessibility: What Your Institutions Are Doing, and How You Can Help

Presenter: Terrill Thompson, UW

There are barriers at each step along the way of making IT accessible in computing courses. EDUCAUSE is a national organization focused on accessible IT within postsecondary education. This last year, I led a poster discussion that focused on students with disabilities sharing their experiences related to IT accessibility. Students shared their issues including inaccessible web-based programs, programs inaccessible to screen readers, inaccessible productivity tools, uncaptioned videos, and a variety of other problems. In higher education, if many of our programs, services, and activities are inaccessible due to these IT issues, it makes it monumentally harder for these students to succeed.

Each institution has tens or hundreds of thousands of web pages, digital documents, videos, and software applications that are inaccessible. For web pages, each page should follow WCAG 2.0 Level AA success criteria as well as Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), which provide a more interactive look at accessibility; however, very few web developers actually consider these when designing their webpages.

For documents, the tagged PDF has been around since 2001 with Adobe Acrobat 5.0, which makes it possible for a document to communicate the structure happening within the text (e.g., headings, alt text). However, making accessible PDFs can be difficult and most authors don’t know many accessibility techniques.

For videos, captions are extremely important for some people to access the information. While automatic speech recognition has improved, there are still many problems with relying on them to have the correct transcription. Furthermore, captioning has other benefits, including a searchable, interactive transcript, usability in quiet areas, and greater ease of access for non-native speakers of English. Videos may also need audio description for people with visual impairments.

Lastly, software is a wide topic with a lot of tricky issues. A growing number of institutions are adding accessibility requirements to their purchasing agreements, which push software developers to create more accessible products.

There are many civil rights complaints and lawsuits that have targeted postsecondary institutions regarding the accessibility of their IT. Their resolutions have brought to light five major points to address:

1. Conduct an audit of the accessibility of IT and develop a corrective action strategy to address problems identified In the audit.
2. Set institutional standards related to accessible technology.