ASSETS 2022 Workshop

BACKGROUND


Rationale

Accessibility knowledge and skills are necessary for computing graduates so they are prepared to design and develop software with accessibility in mind [10,14]. The current status of accessibility education has led to an accessibility gap in the software industry and the production of digital products with many accessibility defects [12,21,23]. Teaching accessibility has been a goal and work-in-progress for academics, industry professionals, and disability advocates [8,9].

Accessibility is taught in various computing courses, such as HCI, web design, software engineering [3], and introductory computer science courses [6]. Instructors employed various teaching methods such as lectures, projects, videos, games [4], and community-based learning [13]. While there have been many who have focused on this important concept, our goal is to bring together the different approaches to teaching different topics to create a comprehensive accessibility education plan.

Issues Addressed

The coverage of accessibility knowledge and skills in computing education is mostly dependent on professors’ interests and limited to the courses these professors teach [1,11,16]. Accessibility topics are rarely organized across a computing degree program and usually lack reinforcement in the design of the curriculum, with the exceptions of a few cases [2,20]. Previous research found that students that learned about accessibility in one of their courses forget about the accessibility knowledge by the time they are graduating [22]. As computing students graduate and move to the software industry, they usually find themselves lacking the necessary knowledge to implement accessibility in their work [12,17,19]. As such, we feel it is important to bring together both those with a focus on accessibility and those with a focus on computing education more generally to create a larger set of educators and resources for teaching accessibility.

Goals

Our main goal is to design a roadmap for rigorous accessibility education in undergraduate computing degrees. To achieve our goal, we will first identify the accessibility knowledge and skills that computing undergraduates should acquire. For this section, we will define accessibility broadly to include not just the technical skills required to implement accessible technology, but also topics such as an understanding of disability, considering disability when talking about ethics and the potential for discrimination, etc. Second, we will create accessibility learning objectives with three levels of performance indicators to assess and evaluate students’ learning outcomes. The learning objectives will be defined using the six levels of cognitive learning: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating [18]. While we will use a number of curriculum guides as well as participant input to determine the topics, we will use the performance indicators as defined by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET): Introductory (I), Reinforced (R), and Emphasized (E), where I is used for formative assessment, and R and E are used for summative assessment [15]. These learning objectives should be shaped by the needs of the community and as such, we will invite not just educators, but also industry professionals and disability advocates to share their insights into what skills graduates need.

Last, we will create a list of accessibility teaching materials as submitted by the workshop participants, labeled by learning objectives [1,7], and make them publicly available. To inform the roadmap for accessibility education, we will invite to the workshop the accessibility education stakeholders, including accessibility researchers, computing educators, industry professionals, and disability advocates.

ORGANIZERS

Catherine M Baker is an Assistant Professor at Creighton University. She studies how we can increase the creation of accessible materials via different approaches including education, company organization and support and the design of tools. Currently, she has the support of an NSF grant on how we can integrate accessibility into core computing courses. She is also one of the Education Outreach Chairs for the ASSETS 2022 Conference.

Yasmine N. Elglaly is an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University. She studies how software development tools may better support the creation of accessible websites and mobile apps. She also investigates the inclusion of accessibility knowledge in fundamental computer science courses. Her work on accessibility education was supported by two SIGCSE Special Projects grants, and two NSF IUSE grants.

Anne Spencer Ross is an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. She is researching a range of social, technical, and organizational factors that impact software's accessibility. At her new position in an undergraduate, teaching-focused university, she is exploring integrating accessibility concepts into core curriculum as well as currently developing a new undergraduate, upper-level elective on accessible computing. She is also one of the Education Outreach Chairs for the ASSETS 2022 Conference.

Kristen Shinohara is an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She researches how to support graduate students with disabilities and how to include accessibility in computing courses. She served on the Accessibility and Inclusive Design ACM/IEEE/AAAI curriculum subcommittee member for HCI, as co-organizer for the SIGCSE pre-symposium session Integrating Accessibility and Disability into the Computing Curriculum in 2022, and participated in Microsoft’s Accessible Computer Science Education Fall Workshop in 2020.

REFERENCES

  1. Catherine M. Baker, Yasmine N. El-Glaly, and Kristen Shinohara. 2020. A Systematic Analysis of Accessibility in Computing Education Research. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 107–113. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366843
  2. Paul Bohman. 2012. Teaching Accessibility and Design-for-All in the Information and Communication Technology Curriculum: Three Case Studies of Universities in the United States, England, and Austria.
  3. Yasmine N. El-Glaly. 2020. Teaching Accessibility to Software Engineering Students. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 121–127. Retrieved June 23, 2022 from https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366914
  4. Greg Gay. 2021. Teaching Accessibility Awareness with Games. In Proceedings of the 18th International Web for All Conference (W4A ’21), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3430263.3452438
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  6. Lin Jia, Yasmine N. Elglaly, Catherine M. Baker, and Kristen Shinohara. 2021. Infusing Accessibility into Programming Courses. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’21), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451625
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