Extra papers

 Shinohara et al (2018b) surveyed a total of 1857 computing and science faculty members across the US. They found that 175 institutions (50%) had at least one instructor teaching accessibility and that no fewer than 2.5% of faculty overall teach accessibility. One of the key questions was what barriers teachers face. The most critical barriers were the absence of clear and discipline specific learning objectives and lack of faculty knowledge about digital accessibility. They wanted resources specific to the area they taught rather than the general accessibility guidelines. Without this it was felt that faculty had s limited capacity to change and were held back because of resources and knowledge preventing them from being change agents. They were also found that those who did teach the subject or had expertise were mainly those who taught human computer interaction courses. Some of the main challenges were that overall they did not know enough to teach it due to lack of resources, pedagogical guidance and textbooks. They also felt there was a lack of demand from industry which didn’t actively encourage the teaching of it. They expressed a need for accessibility modules that could be easily picked up and easily integrated into existing courses without extra modification or customisation, or wanted simple materials and guidance on how instructors could incorporate accessibility related topics for sub-disciplines (p.201).

Bustamante et al (2018) MOOC developed to train teachers on how to design accessible virtual courses so they know how to create accessible materials for their students.

Nishchyk and Chen (2018) highlighted that although certification in digital accessibility has gained general attention in the past few years, there is still insufficient numbers of accessibility specialists who can meet the increasing demand from the job market (p.56).

INTRO: Keates (2015) states that education plays an important role in helping designers acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to find relevant information about users and then to be able to apply it to produce genuinely inclusive products.

Nishchyk and Chen (2018) Although many universities teach biomedical, special education and disability studies programmes, few provide accessibility education in technical specifications or related disciplines (p.57).

Nishchyk and Chen (2018) Publications that describe the teaching of digital accessibility or universal design were mostly integrated into courses such as computing, computer interaction and web development, rather than dedicated courses for the topic. Very few universities have dedicated courses for universal design or digital accessibility.

Nicolle et al (2005) provided a list of 10 recommendations developed by the Inclusive Design Curriculum Network (IDCnet)

Rosmaita (2006) described the concept of teaching accessibility at the beginning of student’s education in universities to better embed and promote accessibility practices and exposing more students.

Waller, Hanson and Sloan (2009) describe teaching accessibility as an integrated approach treating it not as a separate topic but as an integral part of the design and development throughout an entire 4 year programme. Based on the ACM code of professional conduct to not exclude people on any basis, citing disability in this instance. The goal was inclusion and to make accessible technology.

Waller, Hanson and Sloan (2009) One of the contributing factors to accessibility goals not being achieved they put down to lack of knowledge of designers and that computer graduates are not routinely taught these skills. They argue that having an integrated approach to having accessibility on a computing curriculum, not as s separate course provides an exemplary method for training designers and developers (p.155).

Waller, Hanson and Sloan (2009) Particularly effective are those courses in which students get to experience the needs of disabled users through the use of assistive technologies (Carter, 2007; Freire, 2005).

Waller, Hanson and Sloan (2009) Projects involving the creation of accessible products have been deemed successful for learning about accessibility, especially when they involve working with disabled users. These experiences help to significantly increase awareness of accessibility issues and the importance of meeting the needs of a diverse population of users (Ludi, 2007).

Waller, Hanson and Sloan (2009) During practical sessions students gained an understanding of the extent of the difficulties experienced by users by taking part in exercises that effectively disabled them using content in different ways and this gives them valuable experience to be able to apply evaluative techniques and build better products themselves.

Waller, Hanson and Sloan (2009) beyond integrating accessibility into course programs across four year courses, they also created a number of awareness raising activities across the whole organisation to engage all staff in accessibility best practice and policy. They found that there is a tough challenge reaching out to some staff due to lack of awareness of accessibility, they are too busy to develop skills or attend training and often don’t consider themselves web authors even though they create learning materials and upload them to the online environment.

Freire et al (2007) Argue that most web pages that have accessibility problems is mostly due to the lack of knowledge, training and education of developers and their lack of understanding how assistive technology works.

Freire et al (2007) immersed students into the barriers faced by blind users by introducing a short course on screen readers.

Web accessibility definition: Web accessibility corresponds to the ability for a person using any hardware or software that retrieves and renders web content (including assistive technology) to understand and fully interact with the content on the website (Freire et al, 2007; Sierkowski, 2002; Thatcher et al, 2002).

Freire et al (2007) The introduction of accessibility concepts in computer science courses is crucial to reverse this scenario (p.83). Education ‘for’ inclusion is very important to stimulate students promoting inclusion in their future professional practice.

Gellenbeck (2005) incorporated accessibility into the computer science curriculum, ensuring the topic was introduced early on and then integrated within the whole course for maximum coverage.

Rosmaita (2006) suggested an approach of accessibility first’ so that the topic could be an up front and centre focus of a course throughout rather than an add-on.

Harrison(2005) describes the use of screen readers and contact with blind users as being an important way to make students aware of the real-life impact and importance of accessible content.

Freire et al (2007) Explain that their screen reader study was motivated and informed by previous work on making students aware of accessibility issues and building techniques. In all courses they noted that the use of assistive technology helped students better understand the accessibility barriers that blind users encountered (Freire and De Mattos Fortes, 2005; Fortes et al, 2005; Fortes et al, 2005b).

Freire et al (2007) The course covered the main concepts of accessibility and the barriers disabled people faced, the legal aspects, assistive technology, demonstrations of the challenges on the web, guidelines and techniques as well as evaluating and testing websites. Screen readers were specifically used to enhance the learning process. Learners were trained to perform tasks on the screen readers such as opening pages, navigating through links and fill in online forms. They were then asked to perform these tasks either blindfolded or by turning off the monitor display. They had to explore and evaluate websites using both conventional methods as well as the screen reader experiences. This was to test the hypothesis that some issues are better identified when developers properly understand how disabled people use the web. This was not to simulate being blind but to verify the effectiveness of understanding how screen readers worked as a core educational instrument.

Freire et al (2007) Ran a pre-course questionnaire to ascertain web technology knowledge and accessibility related awareness. They found that on average students had little knowledge of accessibility related issues and knew very little about assistive technologies and accessibility laws.

Freire et al (2007) After the screen reader exercises students were able to find more accessibility issues and indicated that the use of screen readers was helpful for students to identify accessibility issues and they appreciated the use of this approach.

Shi et al (2020) created an educational accessibility lab (ALL) that hosted experiences for learning about accessibility, it contained materials such as lecture slides, videos of users and quizzes. It also included simulation materials and activities where people experienced replicated barriers of those who were deaf or hard of hearing, colour blind, blind, had poor dexterity or cognitive issues. The study comprised of 276 students broken into three groups. The first learned about accessibility using existing educational and institutional materials, the second used the lab but without the empathy simulations and the third engaged with all materials including the range of empathy simulations and activities. The labs demonstrated the potential benefits of an experiential learning format and that empathy increases retention and motivation to learn about the importance of accessibility.

El- Glaly (2020) in a survey prior to starting the course 75% of students had no prior knowledge of the topic of digital accessibility and all students acknowledged they had no prior formal education or training on the topic.

El- Glaly (2020) Found that developing an accessibility course for software developers was not straightforward because of the lack of pedagogical support, no teaching resources, textbooks or assignments with rubric sample projects.

El- Glaly (2020) Found that along with the lack of pedagogical support or resources they had difficulty recruiting students because courses or programs that focused solely on accessibility usually suffered poor enrolment.

El- Glaly (2020) Found that when numbers on courses did increase so did the challenge of recruiting people with disabilities to support the students in the various development and testing phases of their software creation.

Sanderson, Kessel and Chen (2022) conducted semi-structured interviews with 35 faculty staff who taught computer science and software engineering disciplines employed in higher education institutions in Norway and Poland. Results found that most participants lacked sufficient understanding of digital barriers and assistive technologies and very few had good awareness of legislation and guidelines related to accessibility or universal design. This was primarily related to them creating accessible learning materials rather than teaching the topic of accessibility, but it did indicate that more training and awareness in this area is needed across all contexts and that higher education institutions internationally have this gap and need to prioritise training in wider strategies and professional development action plans. 

Sanderson, Kessel and Chen (2022) Claim that unless teachers and faculty members are familiar with universal design of learning materials and how to implement this in practice it presents barriers to academic success for learners. This demonstrates that not only are some teachers still struggling to implementation accessibility into their own practice and professional context, so they are unlikely to feel confident to teach it within their computer science or web design courses.

Sanderson, Kessel and Chen (2022) Found that when exploring attitudes studies have shown that attitudes to accessibility and disability can change with knowledge and experience (41, 43, 44) and that knowledge correlates with beliefs and confidence.

Leyser and Greenberger (2008) found that those who had personal contact or experience with people with disabilities or training in disability show significantly more positive attitudes to providing accessible content or accommodations.

Sanderson, Kessel and Chen (2022) Found that many were aware of what was needed but still didn’t have the practical understanding even if some of the essential aspects of making content accessible such as, building in heading styles for structuring a document, writing descriptive links, colour and contrast or adding captions on videos.

Whitney, Keith and Belz (2010) referred to a study amongst companies in the UK that revealed the lack of knowledge as one of the top obstacles against implementing a design for all approach in their commercial projects, closely followed by lack of time and money (Goodman et al, 2006). They also conducted a similar survey amongst 27 professionals who had attended an introduction to accessibility training session in Germany and Ireland where again lack of knowledge and time were highly indicated (Whitney, Keith and Belz, 2010).

Whitney, Keith and Belz (2010) Explain that due to the activities of the W3C group and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), there are now some concrete and comprehensive guidelines for creating accessible websites, but for other digital materials beyond websites these types of guidelines are often missing and as a result there is s lack of training material for professionals across wider industry.

Harrison (2005) describes how a web design course weaved the idea of designing for screen reader users throughout the whole course curriculum, so students eyes were opened up to the world of those who were blind. 

Harrison (2005) The majority of undergraduate students on the web course are often unaware of the challenges that blind people face.

Harrison (2005) Students were required to use screen reader software to experience how they work and how websites were experienced by screen reader users in comparison to others. They were also given a demonstration by a blind member of the university community to demonstrate how she navigated websites by using the tools in the screen reader to skim rapidly through content to determine where she needed to go to. Students gained a sense of the barriers faced especially when basic principles were not put in place such as no image alt text, no headings, tables with merged cells and no table header, as well as filling in online forms. 

Harrison (2005) With new accessibility knowledge they were also required to build an accessible website and it was concluded that by using such an approach learners could rise to the challenge of opening the eyes of those who can see to the world of those who can’t.

In Bong and Chen (2021):

Marquis et al (2016) faculty members lack the knowledge and skills needed to fulfil the goals of creating accessible content and training is needed to increase their levels of competence,

Gilligan (2020) extended the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu) to include digital accessibility so that educators could be digitally competent and to provide a basis for training contents needed to increase faculty competence in higher education.

Tomberg (2014) highlights that many accessibility practices only look at addressing accessibility by validating a level of testing the code which is a low level implementation where developers have no chance of learning about end users and empathising with the difference abilities and barriers they may face, which is an important prerequisite for designing inclusive products.

Tomberg (2014) calls for the pedagogical approach of empathic modelling.

Tomberg (2014) personal abilities such as vision, hearing, cognitive processing, reach, dexterity and locomotion have a tendency to deteriorate with age (p.260) and we have an ever increasing aging population.

Hassell - from PowerPoint slide - no sign of slowing down.

Tomberg (2014) software developers should be involved in s co-design process together with end users with disabilities to ensure they are aware of the needs of wider society as a whole and the range of abilities of potential users.

Tomberg (2014) refers to the definition of empathy by Decety and Jackson (2004) that empathy is a natural ability to understand the emotions and feelings of others, whether one actually witnessed his or her situation, perceived it through a photograph, read about it in a fiction book, or merely imagined it (p.261).

Nicolle and Maguire (2003) describe empathetic modelling as a method of using props and scenarios to be able to simulate the deterioration of both physical and perceptual abilities in the use of everyday scenarios.

Joy, Waller and John (2008) explain this can be achieved by using such tools as wearables and software simulators that can make it more difficult to hear, see, move or restrict capabilities and these can help demonstrate the effects of impairments when using computers.

Ref - people recognise accessibility as ramps, hearing loops etc but don’t always know or recognise that the digital world needs accessibility too.

Tomberg (2014) reports on a course that explored empathetic modelling in both the physical and digital environments to help human computer interface design students fully appreciate the need to design for all. Students had to write up their full experiences in terms of physical artefacts in the outside environment as well as experiences using websites in a blog and fill out an empathy assessment questionnaire. The questionnaire results demonstrated a higher level of general empathy and understanding amongst participants and helped the human computer interface design students to understand the importance of designing for all in the digital context. It was felt as a pedagogical way of learning about people with disabilities they were highly satisfied with their learning experiences. The blogs identified that learners could transfer their knowledge from the physical environment into the digital world and would likely then transfer this knowledge into their future world of work.