There is a vibrant body of work on responsible computing pedagogy across the world. However, there are comparatively fewer programs in the Global South compared to their counterparts in the Global North. This lightning talk describes our current efforts to scale the Responsible Computing Challenge (RCC) globally. The project was initiated in 2018 across the U.S. with its first iteration transforming undergraduate curricula at 17 universities in the country. In 2022 RCC was implemented in Kenya across eight universities, with a call for proposals recently launched in India. Scaling the project aims to increase the impact of responsible computing pedagogy across the world with an emphasis on developing curricula for and within local contexts. Existing inequities that are embedded within and amplified by computing technologies point to a need for a new generation of technologists who can draw from an interdisciplinary toolkit to re-imagine computational innovations. Faculty and students are invited to attend the presentation to engage in lessons drawn from integrating sociotechnical perspectives in computing courses and consider collaborating in RCC towards global impact in prioritizing responsible software and systems. In this lightning talk, we will discuss the project's structure, impact examples from the pilot implementation, early lessons from expanding to Kenya and India, and ideas for collaboration in the global expansion.

Recent news and national reports have significantly increased interest in new approaches for teaching responsible computing to help students understand, evaluate, and address the social impact of existing and emerging computing technologies. This 3-hour workshop will be offered in two workshop format sessions: in-person and online. The first part of each session will introduce responsible computing and its connections to RESPECT and Cultural Competence in Computing (3C). Next, we will provide a short overview of our own work in teaching responsible computing along with frameworks, tools, and best practices. We will showcase four different approaches to teaching responsible computing across institutional settings (high school, college, university), interdisciplinary partnerships (computing, philosophy, STS, digital humanities), and instructional formats (dedicated courses, embedded lessons, design challenges, bootcamps). The workshop presentations will focus on practical advice about how to get started, available resources, securing support from administration and colleagues, and other considerations for this work. In the second half of the workshop, participants will work in small groups to co-design potential lessons based on shared topical interests, institutional settings, and/or learning objectives. Facilitators will provide guidance, recommendations, and classroom examples to help the small groups to complete draft lessons that will be disseminated among workshop participants and on the workshop website. A laptop or internet connected device is needed to participate in the small group activity. Handouts/materials will be provided on the workshop website.

Abstract Current web accessibility guidelines ask visualization designers to support screen readers via basic non‐visual alternatives like textual descriptions and access to raw data tables. But charts do more than summarize data or reproduce tables; they afford interactive data exploration at varying levels of granularity—from fine‐grained datum‐by‐datum reading to skimming and surfacing high‐level trends. In response to the lack of comparable non‐visual affordances, we present a set of rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization and exploration. Through an iterative co‐design process, we identify three key design dimensions for expressive screen reader accessibility: structure, or how chart entities should be organized for a screen reader to traverse; navigation, or the structural, spatial, and targeted operations a user might perform to step through the structure; and, description, or the semantic content, composition, and verbosity of the screen reader's narration. We operationalize these dimensions to prototype screen‐reader‐accessible visualizations that cover a diverse range of chart types and combinations of our design dimensions. We evaluate a subset of these prototypes in a mixed‐methods study with 13 blind and visually impaired readers. Our findings demonstrate that these designs help users conceptualize data spatially, selectively attend to data of interest at different levels of granularity, and experience control and agency over their data analysis process. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at: http://vis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/rich-screen-reader-vis-experiences .

Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health officials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data visualizations showing that the government’s pandemic response was excessive and that the crisis was over. This paper investigates how pandemic visualizations circulated on social media, and shows that people who mistrust the scientific establishment often deploy the same rhetorics of data-driven decision-making used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes. Using a quantitative analysis of how visualizations spread on Twitter and an ethnographic approach to analyzing conversations about COVID data on Facebook, we document an epistemological gap that leads pro- and anti-mask groups to draw drastically different inferences from similar data. Ultimately, we argue that the deployment of COVID data visualizations reflect a deeper sociopolitical rift regarding the place of science in public life.