WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:10.880 --> 00:00:15.360 Technology companies want their products to appeal to a wide audience 00:00:15.460 --> 00:00:17.680 including people with disabilities. 00:00:17.800 --> 00:00:21.100 Universities need to teach about accessibility in their computing courses 00:00:21.140 --> 00:00:24.600 to meet workforce needs. 00:00:28.040 --> 00:00:31.540 I'm Richard Ladner, Professor in Computer Science and Engineering 00:00:31.540 --> 00:00:33.780 at the University of Washington. 00:00:33.860 --> 00:00:40.480 Any course where the thing you're doing is designing or building 00:00:40.540 --> 00:00:43.100 software that people are going to use, 00:00:43.100 --> 00:00:45.620 you should consider the widest variety of people 00:00:45.700 --> 00:00:48.080 that are possibly gonna use it. 00:00:48.080 --> 00:00:51.400 Does the person who's gonna use it have a disability? 00:00:51.520 --> 00:00:54.860 And if so, does your software actually work for them? 00:00:54.860 --> 00:00:57.380 or is it dis-abling? 00:00:57.380 --> 00:00:59.640 Products that are accessibly designed 00:00:59.640 --> 00:01:03.720 can also help users who experience situational disabilities. 00:01:03.720 --> 00:01:07.080 Even people without a disability can be temporarily impaired. 00:01:07.080 --> 00:01:10.060 If you're in a noisy environment, you might like to have captions. 00:01:10.060 --> 00:01:12.960 You know, if you're in a bar - sports bar, something like that, 00:01:12.960 --> 00:01:15.500 and everybody's cheering and you want to see what the announcers are saying, 00:01:15.640 --> 00:01:17.120 well you can read it. 00:01:17.120 --> 00:01:19.540 My name is Andrew Ko, and I'm an associate professor 00:01:19.540 --> 00:01:22.080 at the Information School at the University of Washington. 00:01:22.080 --> 00:01:27.480 One of the things that we've done recently is run a national survey across the United States 00:01:27.480 --> 00:01:30.440 of computer science and information science faculty 00:01:30.520 --> 00:01:35.420 and we reached out to several thousand faculty across the nation 00:01:35.420 --> 00:01:37.460 and found that most of them are actually very eager 00:01:37.460 --> 00:01:38.660 to teach accessibility 00:01:38.660 --> 00:01:41.500 but they don't know how it fits in with computing 00:01:41.500 --> 00:01:43.720 and they don't know how it fits in with the specific classes that they teach. 00:01:43.720 --> 00:01:47.100 I taught a lecture in a computer vision class 00:01:47.260 --> 00:01:50.640 about how to make images accessible 00:01:50.640 --> 00:01:55.260 because computer vision is understanding images. 00:01:55.260 --> 00:01:59.100 And how would you make an image understandable to someone who is blind? 00:01:59.100 --> 00:02:03.220 So that's the conversion of a visual image to a tactile image. 00:02:03.360 --> 00:02:05.440 So I did a whole lecture on that. 00:02:05.440 --> 00:02:09.420 One of the first things that students learn in our web development class 00:02:09.500 --> 00:02:12.560 is about HTML and HTML tags. 00:02:12.560 --> 00:02:16.840 And why not teach HTML through an accessibility lens 00:02:16.840 --> 00:02:20.020 rather than just teaching HTML in general? 00:02:20.020 --> 00:02:24.340 And that actually was a win for everybody because it meant that this fairly dry topic 00:02:24.340 --> 00:02:28.580 that most students weren't excited about turned into this interesting topic 00:02:28.580 --> 00:02:34.500 about a population of people who are blind, interacting with computers through screen readers. 00:02:34.500 --> 00:02:39.620 So students get to experience that while learning this basic foundational material. 00:02:39.680 --> 00:02:42.680 And so they enjoyed it more, instructors enjoyed it more, 00:02:42.700 --> 00:02:44.960 and accessibility was part of that curriculum.