 Teaching accessibility, including accessibility in your courses. Technology companies want their products to appeal to a wide audience, including people with disabilities. These companies need designers and engineers who have the knowledge and skills to develop products for all users. I'm Richard Ladner, professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. Any course where the thing you're doing is designing or building software that people are going to use, you should consider the widest variety of people that are possibly going to use it. Is the person going to use it have a disability? And if so, does your software actually work for them or is it disabling? Products that are excessively designed can also help users who experience situational disabilities. Even people without a disability can be temporarily impaired. If you're in a noisy environment, you might like to have captions. You know, you're in a bar, sports bar, something like that, and everybody's cheering and you want to say what the announcers are saying, well, you can read it. As the population ages, other users may have decreased dexterity, vision or hearing. My name is Matt May. I'm the senior program manager for accessibility at Adobe. Thirty years from now, I'm going to expect the same access to materials as I have today with the faculties that I have today. So when we talk about the aging user, we have to be talking about ourselves in 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Richard Ladner and Matt May have teamed up to give presentations to computing faculty about teaching accessibility in their courses. There are one billion people in the world. That's one one-seventh of the world's population have a disability. And companies like Facebook want customers and they want to make sure what they're offering is really accessible to everyone. The reason that we're expecting some kind of accessibility knowledge for this is that it impacts everything that we do. It impacts every aspect of our business. And so we need to have people with the skills to be able to work on this stuff out of the gate. Facebook, this is for a front-end engineer who wants HTML slash CSS experience, including concepts like layout, specificity, cross-browser compatibility and accessibility. And that's a requirement for that particular job at Facebook. Now, are your students, if they apply to Facebook, do they have this knowledge? My name is Andrew Koh and I'm an associate professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. One of the things that we've done recently is run a national survey across the United States of computer science and information science faculty. And we reached out to several thousand faculty across the nation and found that most of them are actually very eager to teach accessibility, but they don't know how it fits in with computing and they don't know how it fits in with the specific classes that they teach. And so that's one of the problems that we want to solve is to try to find those links between knowledge about accessibility that we want software developers and software engineers to have and where it fits in with the specific classes that faculty are teaching. And then the challenge is getting those faculty to know that knowledge and then finding ways for them to teach it to students in those classes. My name is Shiri Azankat. I'm an assistant professor at Cornell Tech. I have a disability myself and it's what I do research in, so it's a huge part of my life. And I think it's really important to think about how we teach accessibility and to share different models of teaching and best practices because right now there's a huge problem with the way technology is designed. And I think it all starts from the fact that people who end up in technology-related fields tend to be a very homogenous group. So the technology that they design, their output tends to be designed and targeted towards a similarly homogenous group. I try to integrate accessibility or ability, as I like to think of it more generally, throughout the content of those courses. I think it's really important for us to have an ongoing discussion about our users who we're designing the technology for and what assumptions we're making about their abilities and also to consider just a diversity of users. When I say diversity of users, I'm not only talking about this able-bodied versus disabled user binary that a lot of times we think about when we talk about accessibility, but also about users of different ages, users that might have different abilities and different contexts. So for example, maybe you're walking and so your ability to look down at your phone is hindered. Maybe you're older and so your eyesight isn't as good anymore, you need your reading glasses, but you don't want to have to pull them out every time you look at your smartwatch. It should be taught in all the courses that are development or design courses for human-facing software. And that's a lot of our courses. I taught a lecture in a computer vision class about how to make images accessible because computer vision is understanding images and how would you make an image understandable to somebody who's blind? So that's the conversion of a visual image to a tactile image. So I did a whole lecture on that. My name is Jay Michael Moore and I am an instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M University. One thing I did this semester is I contacted our disability services office. I had them come in and demonstrate some technologies, and in this case it turned out to be more assistive technologies for people with visual impairments. But it was really good having the students see the kind of struggles they had and see the kind of technologies they used. And then I followed that up by talking about universal design. Is the information there visibly available? Is it auditorially available? Is it tactically available? Those are the types of things that I think allow you to start being accessible without trying to focus on and thinking, oh my gosh, what if the person has this or that or that? It becomes more about the delivery and the mode of delivery and less about the various types of disabilities or sensory impairments that could be involved in that process. Accessibility really is at the heart of one of the values of our information school. So when I came to the faculty and said, I'd like to teach about accessibility in our curriculum, where do we think it fits? All of them pointed to one of our foundational courses that we teach to our informatics students. It's called Intellectual Foundations of Informatics. And so I worked with those faculty and we talked about how it might fit there. We also decided that in our introductory web development course, web accessibility is such a dominant part of access technology with screen readers and web accessibility standards being really prevalent that we decided that would be a really important part of that course, too. So I sat down with each of the instructors for those two different courses and we worked on where accessibility topics might be integrated and how they might not only just be added to the course but really sort of integrated into the substance of what was being taught. One of the first things that students learn in our web development class is about HTML and HTML tags. And why not teach HTML through an accessibility lens rather than just teaching HTML in general? And that actually was a win for everybody because it meant that this fairly dry topic that most students were excited about turned into this really interesting topic about a population of people who are blind and interacting with computers through screen readers. And so students get to experience that while learning this basic foundational material. And so they enjoyed it more, the instructors enjoyed it more, and accessibility was part of that curriculum. I get a lot of students coming up and saying, are there research opportunities where I can further our understanding of access technologies? Are there other courses in the information school where we can learn about accessibility? Who are the faculty on campus that know more about this? I have a friend that has a disability and I've never really understood how they engage with technology and now I understand it better. And so some of those really concrete experiences and linking them to the bigger ideas around accessibility I think are really powerful for students who are still seeking out majors and ideas. Even one lecture in a class, even half a lecture in a class can completely change the way a student thinks about the world and how people interact with technology because this is not something that they've ever thought of before. Those small encounters with big ideas can be really impactful. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this video are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2018, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.