ALL: Supporting Experiential Accessibility Education and Inclusive Software Development

Abstract

Creating accessible software is imperative for making software inclusive for all users.Unfortunately, the topic of accessibility is frequently excluded from computing education, leading to scenarios where students are unaware of either how to develop accessible software or see the need to create it. To address this challenge, we have created a set of educational labs that are systematically designed to not only inform students about fundamental topics in producing accessible software but also demonstrate its importance. Over the previous year, these labs were included in several Computer Science 2 offerings at the Rochester Institute of Technology, comprising a total of 500 student participants. This article discusses instructional observations from these offerings, some of which include the following: (i) many of the research findings from previous efforts remain true with the larger, more diverse evaluation; (ii) our created material and format reduced students’ belief that creating accessible software was difficult in relation to the baseline,; (iii) we observed that our created material and format benefited student opinion that creating accessible software is important, and (iv) computing majors may not be uniformly impacted by experiential educational accessibility material. The educational labs are publicly available on the project website (https://all.rit.edu).