WEBVTT 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:08.000 Teaching Accessibility: Including Accessibility in Your Courses 00:00:09.901 --> 00:00:13.900 Technology companies want their products to appeal to a wide audience 00:00:15.902 --> 00:00:16.670 including people with disabilities. 00:00:16.670 --> 00:00:20.900 These companies need designers and engineers who have the knowledge and skills 00:00:20.900 --> 00:00:25.000 to develop products for all users. 00:00:27.200 --> 00:00:30.760 I'm Richard Ladner, professor in computer science and engineering 00:00:30.760 --> 00:00:32.140 at the University of Washington. 00:00:33.100 --> 00:00:37.299 Any course where the thing you're doing 00:00:37.299 --> 00:00:42.440 is designing or building software that people are going to use, 00:00:42.440 --> 00:00:46.990 you should consider the widest variety of people that are possibly going to use it. 00:00:46.990 --> 00:00:50.729 Does the person who's going to use it have a disability? 00:00:50.729 --> 00:00:54.070 And if so, does your software actually work for them 00:00:54.070 --> 00:00:55.849 or is it disabling? 00:00:55.849 --> 00:00:58.570 Products that are accessibly designed 00:00:58.570 --> 00:01:02.760 can also help users who experience situational disabilities. 00:01:02.760 --> 00:01:05.710 Even people without a disability can be temporarily impaired. 00:01:05.710 --> 00:01:09.420 If you're in a noisy environment you might like to have captions. 00:01:09.420 --> 00:01:12.900 Or if you're in a bar or sports bar, something like that, and everybody's cheering 00:01:12.900 --> 00:01:14.740 and you want to see what the announcers are saying, 00:01:14.740 --> 00:01:16.160 well you can read it. 00:01:16.160 --> 00:01:18.540 As the population ages, 00:01:18.540 --> 00:01:24.009 other users may have decreased dexterity, vision, or hearing. 00:01:24.009 --> 00:01:25.009 My name is Matt May. 00:01:25.009 --> 00:01:28.990 I am the senior program manager for accessibility at Adobe. 00:01:28.990 --> 00:01:31.620 Thirty years from now I'm going to expect the same access 00:01:31.740 --> 00:01:37.700 to materials as I have today with the faculties that I have today. 00:01:37.710 --> 00:01:40.220 So when we talk about the aging user 00:01:40.220 --> 00:01:44.690 we have to be talking about ourselves in 20, 30, 40, 50 years. 00:01:44.690 --> 00:01:46.620 Richard Ladner and Matt May 00:01:46.620 --> 00:01:50.310 have teamed up to give presentations to computing faculty 00:01:50.310 --> 00:01:52.920 about teaching accessibility in their courses. 00:01:52.920 --> 00:01:55.940 There are one billion people in the world– 00:01:55.940 --> 00:02:01.060 that's one-seventh of the world’s population– 00:02:01.060 --> 00:02:02.060 have a disability 00:02:02.060 --> 00:02:05.229 and companies like Facebook want customers 00:02:05.229 --> 00:02:07.440 and they want to make sure what they're offering 00:02:07.440 --> 00:02:09.560 is really accessible to everyone. 00:02:09.560 --> 00:02:16.440 The reason that we're expecting some kind of accessibility knowledge for this 00:02:16.440 --> 00:02:18.890 is that it impacts everything that we do. 00:02:18.890 --> 00:02:21.910 It impacts every aspect of our business 00:02:21.910 --> 00:02:24.760 and so we need to have people with the skills 00:02:24.760 --> 00:02:27.110 to be able to work on this stuff out of the gate. 00:02:27.110 --> 00:02:30.520 Facebook, this is for a front end engineer, 00:02:30.520 --> 00:02:34.530 wants HTML/CSS experience including concepts like 00:02:34.530 --> 00:02:38.780 layout, specificity, cross browser compatibility 00:02:38.780 --> 00:02:40.180 and accessibility. 00:02:40.180 --> 00:02:42.890 And that's a requirement for that particular job at Facebook. 00:02:42.890 --> 00:02:44.690 Now are your students – if they apply to Facebook - 00:02:44.690 --> 00:02:46.540 do they have this knowledge? 00:02:46.540 --> 00:02:50.070 My name is Andrew Ko and I'm an associate professor 00:02:50.070 --> 00:02:53.630 at the Information School at the University of Washington. 00:02:53.630 --> 00:02:55.040 One of the things that we've done recently 00:02:55.040 --> 00:02:58.140 is run a national survey across the United States 00:02:58.140 --> 00:03:01.190 of computer science and information science faculty 00:03:01.190 --> 00:03:04.160 and we reached out to several thousand faculty 00:03:04.160 --> 00:03:08.000 across the nation and found that most of them are actually very eager 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:11.489 to teach accessibility, but they don't know how it fits in with computing 00:03:11.489 --> 00:03:15.110 and they don't know how it fits in with the specific classes that they teach. 00:03:15.110 --> 00:03:16.600 So that's one of the problems we want to solve 00:03:16.600 --> 00:03:20.290 is to try to find those links between knowledge about accessibility 00:03:20.290 --> 00:03:24.569 that we want software developers and software engineers to have 00:03:24.569 --> 00:03:28.510 and where it fits in with the specific classes that faculty are teaching. 00:03:28.510 --> 00:03:32.680 And then the challenge is getting those faculty to know that knowledge 00:03:32.680 --> 00:03:36.569 and then finding ways for them to teach it to students in those classes. 00:03:36.569 --> 00:03:38.540 My name is Shiri Azenkot. 00:03:38.540 --> 00:03:41.970 I am an assistant professor at Cornell Tech. 00:03:41.970 --> 00:03:46.890 I have a disability myself and it's what I do research in 00:03:46.890 --> 00:03:49.340 so it's a huge part of my life. 00:03:49.340 --> 00:03:54.340 And I think it's really important to think about how we teach accessibility 00:03:54.340 --> 00:03:59.650 and to share different models of teaching and best practices. 00:03:59.650 --> 00:04:04.019 Because right now there's a huge problem with the way technology is designed. 00:04:04.019 --> 00:04:07.580 And I think it all starts from the fact that 00:04:07.580 --> 00:04:10.260 people who end up in technology-related fields 00:04:10.260 --> 00:04:13.319 tend to be a very homogenous group. 00:04:13.319 --> 00:04:17.199 So the technology that they design, their output, tends to be 00:04:17.199 --> 00:04:21.909 designed and targeted towards a similarly homogenous group. 00:04:21.909 --> 00:04:28.039 I try to integrate accessibility or ability, 00:04:28.039 --> 00:04:30.800 as I like to think of it, more generally 00:04:30.800 --> 00:04:34.270 throughout the content of those courses. 00:04:34.270 --> 00:04:38.659 I think it's really important for us to have an ongoing discussion 00:04:38.659 --> 00:04:43.370 about our users who we’re designing the technology for 00:04:43.370 --> 00:04:47.669 and what assumptions we’re making about their abilities 00:04:47.669 --> 00:04:51.310 and also to consider just a diversity of users. 00:04:51.310 --> 00:04:53.669 When I say a diversity of users, I'm not only talking about 00:04:53.669 --> 00:04:57.860 this able-bodied versus disabled user binary 00:04:57.860 --> 00:05:02.789 that a lot of times we think about when we talk about accessibility, 00:05:02.789 --> 00:05:06.219 but also about users of different ages, 00:05:06.219 --> 00:05:10.860 users that might have different abilities in different contexts. 00:05:10.860 --> 00:05:12.719 So for example, maybe you're walking 00:05:12.719 --> 00:05:17.969 and so your ability to look down at your phone is hindered. 00:05:17.969 --> 00:05:21.380 Maybe you're older and so your eyesight isn't as good anymore. 00:05:21.380 --> 00:05:22.880 You need your reading glasses 00:05:22.920 --> 00:05:26.620 but you don't want to have to pull them out every time you look at your smartwatch. 00:05:27.660 --> 00:05:29.860 It should be taught in all the courses that are 00:05:29.860 --> 00:05:34.819 development or design courses for human facing software. 00:05:34.819 --> 00:05:36.610 And that's a lot of our courses. 00:05:36.610 --> 00:05:43.690 I taught a lecture in a computer vision class about how to make images accessible. 00:05:43.690 --> 00:05:48.020 Because computer vision is understanding images. 00:05:48.020 --> 00:05:51.589 And how would you make an image understandable to somebody who's blind? 00:05:51.589 --> 00:05:55.650 That's a conversion of a visual image to a tactile image, 00:05:55.650 --> 00:05:57.119 so I did a whole lecture on that. 00:05:57.119 --> 00:05:58.960 My name is J. Michael Moore 00:05:58.960 --> 00:06:03.740 and I am an instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M University. 00:06:03.740 --> 00:06:08.110 One thing I did this semester is I contacted our disability services office. 00:06:08.110 --> 00:06:12.710 I had them come in and demonstrate some technologies 00:06:12.710 --> 00:06:14.669 and in this case it turned out to be 00:06:14.669 --> 00:06:18.610 more assistive technologies for people with visual impairments 00:06:18.610 --> 00:06:20.020 but it was really good 00:06:20.020 --> 00:06:23.710 having the students see the kind of struggles they had 00:06:23.710 --> 00:06:26.180 and see the kind of technologies they use. 00:06:26.180 --> 00:06:30.580 Then I followed that up by doing, talking about universal design. 00:06:31.509 --> 00:06:34.020 Is the information there visibly available? 00:06:34.029 --> 00:06:36.089 Is it auditorially available? 00:06:36.089 --> 00:06:38.749 Is it tactilely available? 00:06:38.749 --> 00:06:43.610 Those are the types of things that I think allow you to start being accessible 00:06:43.610 --> 00:06:45.599 without trying to focus on and thinking, 00:06:45.599 --> 00:06:49.699 “Oh my gosh, what if the person has this or that or that?” 00:06:49.699 --> 00:06:52.879 It becomes more about the delivery and the mode of delivery 00:06:52.879 --> 00:06:57.529 and less about the various types of disabilities 00:06:57.529 --> 00:07:02.030 or sensory impairments that can be involved in that process. 00:07:02.030 --> 00:07:03.529 Accessibility really is 00:07:03.529 --> 00:07:07.080 at the heart of one of the values of our Information School. 00:07:07.080 --> 00:07:09.529 So when I came to the faculty and said, 00:07:09.529 --> 00:07:12.240 “I'd like to teach about accessibility in our curriculum. 00:07:12.240 --> 00:07:14.069 Where do we think it fits?” 00:07:14.069 --> 00:07:16.289 All of them pointed to one of our foundational courses 00:07:16.289 --> 00:07:18.309 that we teach to our informatics students. 00:07:18.309 --> 00:07:21.280 It's called Intellectual Foundations of Informatics. 00:07:21.280 --> 00:07:25.969 And so I worked with those faculty and we talked about how it might fit there. 00:07:25.969 --> 00:07:30.270 We also decided that in our introductory web development course, 00:07:30.270 --> 00:07:34.569 web accessibility is such a dominant part of access technology 00:07:34.569 --> 00:07:39.550 with screen readers and web accessibility standards being really prevalent, 00:07:39.550 --> 00:07:42.840 that we decided that it would be a really important part of that course too. 00:07:42.840 --> 00:07:47.860 So I sat down with each of the instructors for those two different courses 00:07:47.860 --> 00:07:51.629 and we worked on where accessibility topics might be integrated 00:07:51.629 --> 00:07:54.229 and how they might not only just be added to the course 00:07:54.229 --> 00:07:59.560 but really sort of integrated into the substance of what was being taught. 00:07:59.560 --> 00:08:03.440 One of the first things that students learn in our web development class 00:08:03.580 --> 00:08:06.700 is about HTML and HTML tags. 00:08:06.709 --> 00:08:10.679 And why not teach HTML through an accessibility lens 00:08:10.679 --> 00:08:14.029 rather than just teaching HTML in general? 00:08:14.029 --> 00:08:15.679 And that actually was a win for everybody 00:08:15.679 --> 00:08:19.819 because it meant that this fairly dry topic that no students were excited about 00:08:19.819 --> 00:08:21.669 turned into this really interesting topic 00:08:21.669 --> 00:08:26.259 about a population of people who are blind 00:08:26.259 --> 00:08:28.459 interacting with computers through screen readers. 00:08:28.459 --> 00:08:33.510 And so students get to experience that while learning this basic foundational material. 00:08:33.510 --> 00:08:36.280 And so they enjoyed it more, the instructors enjoyed it more, 00:08:36.280 --> 00:08:39.580 and accessibility was part of that curriculum. 00:08:39.580 --> 00:08:41.410 I get a lot of students coming up and saying, 00:08:41.410 --> 00:08:43.180 “Are there research opportunities where I can 00:08:43.180 --> 00:08:46.840 further our understanding of access technologies?” 00:08:46.840 --> 00:08:49.240 “Are there other courses in the Information School 00:08:49.240 --> 00:08:50.570 where we can learn about accessibility?” 00:08:50.570 --> 00:08:54.010 “Who are the faculty on campus that know more about this?” 00:08:54.010 --> 00:08:57.650 “I have a friend that has a disability and I've never really understood 00:08:57.650 --> 00:08:59.270 how they engage with technology. 00:08:59.270 --> 00:09:00.890 Now I understand it better.” 00:09:00.890 --> 00:09:02.760 So some of those really concrete experiences 00:09:02.760 --> 00:09:06.550 and linking them to the bigger ideas around accessibility, 00:09:06.550 --> 00:09:08.990 I think are really powerful for students 00:09:08.990 --> 00:09:12.380 who are still seeking out majors and ideas. 00:09:12.380 --> 00:09:15.500 Even one lecture in a class, even half a lecture in a class, 00:09:15.500 --> 00:09:18.810 can completely change the way a student thinks about the world 00:09:18.810 --> 00:09:20.940 and how people interact with technology. 00:09:20.940 --> 00:09:23.940 Because this is not something that they've ever thought of before. 00:09:23.940 --> 00:09:28.500 Those small encounters with big ideas can be really impactful.