While accessibility is an increasingly prominent topic in computer science curricula, little attention has been paid to the meta-challenge of making accessibility courses themselves truly inclusive. Such courses must be exemplars of the principles they teach, creating a welcoming environment for the students with disabilities these courses often attract. This paper presents the design of an undergraduate course on accessible computing developed from the ground up to be inclusive of students with disabilities. Drawing upon thematic analysis of reflective surveys from students, including a significant cohort of students with disabilities, and invited experts with disabilities, we highlight the pedagogical and structural elements that moved the course from a stance of reactive accommodation to one of proactive inclusion. We distill our findings into a set of actionable recommendations for educators on fostering an inclusive learning environment. These recommendations focus on three key areas: 1) implementing flexible course policies and assessments, 2) centering the lived experiences of people with disabilities throughout the curriculum, and 3) creating a classroom culture of shared vulnerability, respect, and empowerment.

Accessibility is often only introduced later in computing students' coursework in the classes that focus on creating user interfaces. However, there are various approaches to introduce accessibility earlier in the curriculum. We present a data-driven approach that uses data about accessibility or disability as the context for computing problems such as database searching and inheritance modeling. These examples illustrate for educators how they can include accessibility in a wide range of courses.

Despite growing attention to autism in technology design, the unique communication style of gestalt language processing, where language is acquired as holistic chunks rather than discrete words, remains largely overlooked in HCI and educational technologies.This single case study examines the technology needs of a young autistic child who communicates using gestalt language processing.Over five months, the child's caregiver kept a reflective journal documenting technology interactions that revealed three key design mismatches between existing technologies and the child's communication preferences.We found that mainstream and social stories often lack emotional balance; language apps overlook the developmental trajectory of gestalt learners including pronoun reversal; and reward-based feedback in educational games misaligns with the child's play motivations.These findings highlight the need for storytelling tools with adjustable emotional arcs, language apps that help children decompose and recontextualize scripts, and feedback systems focused on engagement rather than rewards and competition.These insights inform inclusive design approaches that recognize and support diverse autistic communication styles currently underserved by existing technologies.

This research examines the use of advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, specifically GPT-3.5/4 models, to enhance text-based learning for neurodiverse students within higher education. Recognizing that conventional pedagogical resources often fail to meet the distinct needs of learners with neurodevelopmental differences, our research explores the hypothesis that NLP-enabled personalization of academic content can facilitate effective, equitable, and engaging educational experiences for college students. We present AImpathizer, a tool designed to adapt academic content into representations more congruent with the cognitive styles of neurodiverse students. AImpathizer is designed using a user-centric approach, highlighting the challenges and needs of neurodiverse college students. AImpathizer aims to incorporate more accessibility modifications in comparison to traditional academic content. The outcomes of this research aim to provide empirical evidence supporting the integration of NLP tools into educational environments in synergy with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, paving the way for more inclusive educational practices.

There are many disabilities that affect a person's ability to speak. As such, alternatives to verbal communication are often sought. These alternatives are referred to as Augmented and Alternative Communication Systems (AACs). An AAC can be either high-tech or low/no-tech. While many AACs require a user to type out what they want spoken, there are also AACs that rely on symbols for communication. We introduced these topics to students using an assignment that asks students to create the backend for a symbol based AAC device. The device will have a symbol board where there is a page with categories (e.g. food, clothing), which when selected goes to another page with the different items. When an image is selected within the category, the relevant text is spoken aloud. The students are asked to write the relevant methods for the AAC such as determining what images to load and what is spoken aloud. This assignment was used in a data structures course to give students experience working with maps. This assignment is focused for students who are working in Java and comfortable with an object-oriented approach. The real-world context of using devices that are commonly used by people with disabilities that affect their speech was interesting to students. The assignment served as an introduction to certain disabilities and showed students the real-world use of technology to help people communicate.

Incorporating accessibility education into undergraduate computer science (CS) programs is essential for preparing future technology professionals to create inclusive technology. However, many CS programs lack accessibility coverage, often confining it to human-computer interaction (HCI) courses. To address this gap, we developed accessibility assignments seamlessly integrated into core CS courses. We collaborated closely with ten instructors to select and customize these assignments to suit their needs. To evaluate the impact of these assignments, we conducted interviews with instructors and administered surveys and interviews with their students. Our findings indicate significant improvement in students' familiarity with accessibility concepts and confidence in implementation following completion of the assignments. However, their mindset and future interest in accessibility remained the same. Instructors found it straightforward to incorporate these assignments without compromising core computing concepts. In sum, we validated a foundation for effectively resourcing instructors with accessibility teaching materials and increasing their capacity in accessibility knowledge.

In recent years an increasing number of autistic students enrolled in college, many choosing computer science (CS) and related majors. However, the retention and graduation rates for autistic students are considerably lower than for neurotypical students. Research investigating factors that influence autistic students' success in college is sparse. More importantly, there is a scarcity of research that examines assessment techniques used and factors that influence the success of autistic CS students. Here, we report findings based on a systematic literature review$(\mathrm{N}=44)$that aims to examine the experience of autistic CS students to identify factors that influence their success given current assessment techniques. Our findings indicate that traditional accommodations, which in general are difficult to access and lack personalization, fall short of addressing many of the challenges autistic students face. The absence of a common vocabulary and communication style (e.g., verbal, instructions, teaching materials) and differences in learning style and cognitive processing between autistic students and neurotypical instructors hinders autistic students' academic success. Executive functioning (EF) challenges impact both academic and social aspects. However, accommodations targeted at addressing challenges related to EF are overlooked. Finally, despite many autistic students' affinity for technological interventions, their incorporation in accommodation is almost non-existent. We propose a set of actionable guidelines that could aid many of the challenges autistic students experience in CS programs, including designing a curriculum inspired by universal design, designing personalized accommodations, and incorporating technological interventions as part of the accommodation process.

Accessibility, the means by which a person with a disability can equitably access, engage with, and use digital technology, is an important topic for tech professions to know, but it is not commonly included in computing curricula. Prior research has shown that professional development opportunities are needed as few instructors are currently including accessibility into their courses and more instructors do not feel they have adequate training to include the information. The lack of accessibility skills in graduates is a current issue for the tech industry, which is facing a skills gap as laws and regulations place an increasing need for the skills. This workshop seeks to close that skills gap by having three instructors with extensive experience in accessibility and integrating it into their classroom partner with Teach Access, a non-profit organization with strong ties to the tech industry that focuses on bridging the accessibility skills gap across academia and industry, to share their experiences and guide instructors through making changes to their own courses. The workshop will first provide instructors with a background about accessibility. Next, we will cover examples of how to integrate accessibility into courses. Finally, instructors will work in small groups based on the courses they are teaching to develop modifications to their own courses.

Few instructors include accessibility in computing education curriculum despite its importance in the computing field. Prior work on accessibility and CS education vary on what accessibility knowledge is appropriate for future computing professionals and is covered mainly in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and web design courses. In practice, there is no comprehensive list of learning objectives to characterize Accessibility as a competency even though it is an increasingly desired skillset across computing broadly. Moreover, in the soon-to-be-released CS2023, the Accessibility Knowledge Unit is nested within HCI. This placement fails to highlight the role accessibility plays throughout the CS curriculum, nor does it provide sufficient structure to guide CS educators. Thus, these efforts may not be enough to prepare future tech professionals with adequate accessibility skills to meet growing industry demand. We argue that Accessibility should be its own Knowledge Area within the CS curriculum. We present a set of knowledge units with topics and illustrative learning objectives for an Accessibility Knowledge Area in Computing Education. These objectives were produced through synthesizing computing education and accessible computing literature and discussions among the authors, who are subject matter experts in both computing education and accessibility. In this position paper, we make the case that Accessibility should be incorporated into computer science across the curriculum beyond just HCI, and we demonstrate how the knowledge units spans the different facets of computing. In addition to highlighting the cross-curriculum importance of Accessibility, the presented Knowledge Area outline provides structure for future work in creating teaching resources and guiding curricular integration.

Ensuring the fairness of machine learning (ML) systems for individuals with disabilities is crucial. Proactive measures are required to identify and mitigate biases in data and models, thereby preventing potential harm or bias against people with disabilities. While previous research on ML fairness education primarily concentrated on gender and race fairness, the domain of disability fairness has received comparatively little attention. Addressing this gap, we adopted a student-centric approach to craft a disability fairness teaching intervention. A focus group of students experienced in ML and accessible computing underscored the significance of engagement and scaffolding strategies for effectively learning intricate topics. Consequently, we crafted a disability fairness hands-on programming assignment that delves into uncovering disability bias with a lens that takes intersectionality into account. The assignment was tailored for an introductory undergraduate data science (DS) course. We employed reflective questions and surveys to gauge the effectiveness of our approach. The findings indicate the success of our approach in promoting a deeper understanding of disability fairness within the context of DS education.

Alternative (alt) text is essential for the accessibility of images to screen reader users. Alt text can be authored by end users or generated automatically using machine learning. Automated methods, while fast and cheap, do not result in high quality alt text. Meanwhile, the large number of images with no alt text on social media indicates that many users do not author alt text for the images they upload. Little is known about whether design elements that motivate and support users are integrated into alt text user interfaces (UIs). We reviewed the current state of alt text UIs in literature, and characterized their design according to behavior change and accountability design factors. We found that the majority of reviewed UIs contained general prompts with no specific motivator or guidance. Many of the UIs did not incorporate design elements to encourage accountability or behavior change. We recommend that future alt text authoring tools incorporate design elements which decrease the user’s cognitive effort, employ motivational and well-timed triggers, and leverage user accountability through alt text visibility and its association with the user’s social presence.

The involvement of individuals with disabilities in online discussions related to disability and accessibility is a critical area of study. While previous research has qualitatively examined the participation of individuals with disabilities on social media platforms, large-scale analysis of social media content by people with disabilities has been an underexplored area. This paper presents a pioneering large-scale study of disability communities on Reddit. We developed an anonymized text-based dataset that consists of 1.5 million comments posted on three subreddits: r/disability, r/Blind, and r/ADHD. Using topic modeling, we analyzed the dataset and identified eight highly-coherent common categories and their associated keywords across the three subreddits. We contribute an Anonymized Disability Discourse Reddit Corpus (ADDReC) of 1.5 million comments that feature eight disability discourse categories.

Machine learning (ML) models are often included in high-risk algorithmic decision-making software. Hence, ML is a particularly important facet of ethics education so that models are less biased and more fair to all users. Natural Language Processing (NLP) specifically functions on text, a human produced artifact, making it more prone to inheriting flawed biases. However, teaching about ethics in ML courses is lacking. To address this issue, we created 3 interventions in an NLP course to introduce students to biases in ML models. We employed a combination of hands-on programming activities, lecture, and a project that discusses ML fairness at different levels and for different populations including gender bias and disability bias. Each intervention included a reflection question about bias. We also interviewed 6 students to further understand the impact of the interventions. The answers to the reflection questions and the interviews were qualitatively analyzed using inductive coding. We found that integrating fairness topics throughout the NLP course with repeated discussions led to an overall positive shift in students' attitudes and awareness towards ML fairness.

Accessibility is an important skillset for computing graduates, however it is commonly not included in computing curriculums. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the relevant stakeholders who are interested in adding accessibility into the curriculum (e.g. computing educators, accessibility researchers, and industry professionals) to discuss what exactly we should be teaching regarding accessibility. The format of the workshop works to support two main goals, to provide a consensus on what should be taught by computing educators regarding accessibility and to provide those who have taught accessibility a chance to share and discuss what they have found to be successful. As a part of this workshop, we plan to draft a white paper that discusses the learning objectives and their relative priorities that were derived in the workshop.

In the software industry, good design often translates into good user experiences. As accessibility is a key component of usable software, there are opportunities for software professionals to include accessibility in their skill set. However, despite a push to motivate more companies to include accessibility as a desired knowledge and skill set, little is known about how much companies are seeking to recruit employees with accessibility proficiency. In this paper, we investigated the extent to which companies seek software designer and developer skills in accessibility by analyzing software job posts on LinkedIn. Our results showed that the majority of job posts did not require any accessibility skills, and that educating developers and designers about accessibility was a required qualification for many of the accessibility-focused software jobs.

Understanding accessibility and how it relates to artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology is an imperative skill for computing students from both an ethical and employment standpoint. Unfortunately, AI courses do not typically cover accessibility. When teaching ethics in AI, discussions on bias and fairness cover user diversity in terms of gender and race, but not disability. To address the lack of teaching accessibility in AI courses, we conducted a pilot study to explore what and how accessibility topics can be integrated into an AI course, titled Natural Language Processing (NLP). We added to the NLP course some general and quick accessibility topics through means such as a short guest lecture, a programming assignment and a final project that connect accessibility and AI. We gathered student feedback through a pre-survey, a post-survey and interviews with five students. The course we looked at took place synchronously in an online setting using Zoom. In this context, we observed how implementing accessibility topics remotely into the course affected students in their knowledge of accessibility and disability.

Assistive robots can be found in hospitals and rehabilitation clinics, where they help patients maintain a positive disposition. Our proposed robotic mobility solution combines state of the art hardware and software to provide a safer, more independent, and more productive lifestyle for people with some of the most severe disabilities. New hardware includes, a retractable roof, manipulator arm, a hard backpack, a number of sensors that collect environmental data and processors that generate 3D maps for a hands-free human-machine interface.The proposed new system receives input from the user via head tracking or voice command, and displays information through augmented reality into the user’s field of view. The software algorithm will use a novel cycle of self-learning artificial intelligence that achieves autonomous navigation while avoiding collisions with stationary and dynamic objects. The prototype will be assembled and tested over the next three years and a publicly available version could be ready two years thereafter.

Despite the existence of accessibility testing tools, software still largely inaccessible mainly due to lack of awareness among developers and issues with existing tools [14, 18]. This motivated us to evaluate the accessibility support of development tools that do not require specific accessibility knowledge such as web frameworks. We tested the accessibility support of three JavaScript web frameworks; Angular, React, and Vue. For each of the three frameworks, we built a web application with 32 pages, each of which violated a single accessibility guideline. We found that only React generated a warning for one of the accessibility violations that is lack of label for non-text content. The rest of the accessibility violations went unnoticed by the three frameworks.

In a typical elementary mathematics(math) class, Students with Writing Disabilities (SWD) operate at a disadvantage. Math lessons and techniques are geared towards students who are able to actively ‘work out’ math problems with pencil and paper. We conducted interviews with special educators in elementary schools to learn about the pros and cons of current writing assistive technologies that are used in classrooms for math. Informed by the interviews findings, we designed a prototype called SMPL that enables SWD to work out math problems digitally. We ran a user study with 8 SWD to obtain feedback on SMPL. We present the interviews and user study findings. We found that: 1) There is a lack of writing assistive technologies that are designed specifically for elementary math learning; 2) It is feasible to provide SWD with a math learning experience similar to their peers; and 3) The writing assistive technology should be adaptive to students’ skills and backgrounds.

In recent years, mobile accessibility has become an important trend with the goal of allowing all users the possibility of using any app without many limitations. User reviews include insights that are useful for app evolution. However, with the increase in the amount of received reviews, manually analyzing them is tedious and time-consuming, especially when searching for accessibility reviews. The goal of this paper is to support the automated identification of accessibility in user reviews, to help technology professionals in prioritizing their handling, and thus, creating more inclusive apps. Particularly, we design a model that takes as input accessibility user reviews, learns their keyword-based features, in order to make a binary decision, for a given review, on whether it is about accessibility or not. The model is evaluated using a total of 5,326 mobile app reviews. The findings show that (1) our model can accurately identify accessibility reviews, outperforming two baselines, namely keyword-based detector and a random classifier; (2) our model achieves an accuracy of 85% with relatively small training dataset; however, the accuracy improves as we increase the size of the training dataset.

We designed and implemented an online module that explains accessibility to non-major high school students. The module demonstrates one of the important Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as Reflow, using hands-on experience. Reflow is a particularly essential feature for the accessibility of webpages for people with cognitive impairments. The module consists of an interactive lecture and engaging quizzes. We held an online one-hour workshop where the activity was presented to 52 high school students. We collected objective and subjective data about students' knowledge and learning experience using 3 questionnaires. Our findings indicate that the module is effective in raising students' awareness of disabilities, leveraging their knowledge on accessibility, and maintaining high interest in pursuing a computing degree.

Recent interest in accessibility emphasizes including it in computer science curriculum as key to producing effective computing professionals. Despite a general consensus that teaching accessibility in computing curriculum is good, there exist few tools and resources to support instructors in higher education. To better understand the relationship between accessibility in curriculum and research, we conducted a systematic literature review of papers in computing education. We analyzed the papers for the courses accessibility is covered in, the topics that are covered and pedagogies and assessment approaches that are used. Across this body of work, we found a number of key learning objectives commonly covered in computing education research, though it appeared the research did not evenly cover these objectives throughout curricula, nor did the research systematically investigate how learning objectives were integrated. Based on these results, we offer suggestions for future directions of accessibility education research and curriculum building.

This paper describes the development process of a graduate course on accessibility that is offered as an elective for software engineering students. The paper reports on the three iterations of the course evolution as topics and pedagogy are updated from one iteration to the next. The main motivation of the course updates was to cover the educational needs of software engineering students, which are not the same as HCI or design students. Software engineering students learned better and became more engaged with the topic of accessibility when it was tied to programming and development- based activities. The final form of the course was evaluated using a survey, and the results showed that students found the course beneficial to their education and relevant to their career. We discuss the challenges of creating, teaching, and maintaining a course on accessibility, and we offer insights on what research is needed in this area to support accessibility educators.

This workshop will introduce our Accessibility Learning Labs (ALL). The objectives of this collaborative project with The National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) are to both inform participants about foundational topics in accessibility and to demonstrate the importance of creating accessible software. The labs enable easy classroom inclusion by providing instructors all necessary materials including lecture and activity slides and videos. Each lab addresses an accessibility issue and contains: I) Relevant background information on the examined issue; II) An example web-based application containing the accessibility problem; III) A process to emulate this accessibility problem; IV) Details about how to repair the problem from a technical perspective; V) Incidents from people who encountered this accessibility issue and how it has impacted their life.

Older adults want to live independently and at the same time stay socially active. We conducted contextual inquiry to understand what usability problems they face while interacting with social media on touch screen devices. We found that it is hard for active older adults to understand and learn mobile social media interfaces due to lack of support of safe interface exploration and insufficient cognitive affordances. We designed TapTag to enhance the learnability for older adults on touch screens. TapTag is an assistive gestural interaction model that utilizes muti-step single taps. TapTag breaks the interaction process to 2 steps, one gesture is to explore the user interface (UI), and the second is to activate the functionality of the UI element. We prototyped TapTag as an overlay on the top of Facebook app. We conducted a comparative study where older adults used Facebook app and Facebook with TapTag. The results showed that Facebook with TapTag provided a better user experience for older adults in terms of learnability, accessibility, and ease of use.

With the increased ubiquity of mobile devices around the world, it is imperative to ensure that these devices and their applications (apps) are accessible to users with disabilities. Although design style guides are undergoing a paradigm shift with the promotion of 'mobile-first' ideology, we have yet to witness a concrete step being taken towards the establishment of universal guidelines for mobile app accessibility. To address this issue, we compile an exhaustive list of guidelines to gauge mobile app accessibility. We present a mobile-specific framework to categorize the guidelines. We then underline the importance of these clearly defined guidelines by putting the most popular 25 apps from the Google Play Store under their lens. The results indicate low rates of violations of accessibility guidelines at the system level, and a high rate of violations at design and content levels. We highlight the most and the least violated guidelines. We discuss in detail the overall accessibility of evaluated apps and identified patterns in violations of established rules.

Even with advances in technology, group meetings between hearing and deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students can be challenging for all participants. This paper introduces CollabAll, a system that aims to better facilitate productive meetings between D/HH and hearing students. CollabAll provides D/HH individuals with a mechanism to actively participate in making decisions and getting their point across in team meetings. CollabAll enables every team member to create discussion topics for their meeting, track the person currently communicating and the current topic being discussed along with providing a mechanism for "polite" interruptions. Early feedback from participatory design and focus group studies indicated a positive user experience.

Slate-type devices allow Individuals with Blindness or Severe Visual Impairment (IBSVI) to read in place with the touch of their fingertip by audio-rendering the words they touch. Such technologies are helpful for spatial cognition while reading. However, users have to move their fingers slowly or they may lose place on screen. Also, IBSVI may wander between lines without realizing they did. In this paper, we address these two interaction problems by introducing dynamic speech-touch interaction model, and intelligent reading support system. With this model, the speed of the speech will dynamically change coping up with the user's finger speed. The proposed model is composed of: 1- Audio Dynamics Model, and 2- Off-line Speech Synthesis Technique. The intelligent reading support system predicts the direction of reading, corrects the reading word if the user drifts, and notifies the user using a sonic gutter to help her from straying off the reading line. We tested the new audio dynamics model, the sonic gutter, and the reading support model in two user studies. The participants' feedback helped us fine-tune the parameters of the two models. Finally, we ran an evaluation study where the reading support system is compared to other VoiceOver technologies. The results showed preponderance to the reading support system with its audio dynamics and intelligent reading support components.

In this paper we introduce the idea of making touch surfaces of mobile devices (e.g. touch phones and tablets) truly tangible for Individuals with Blindness or Severe Visual Impairment (IBSVI). We investigate how to enable IBSVI to fuse tangible landmark patterns with layout of page and location of lexical elements -- words, phrases, and sentences. We designed a tactile overlay that gives tangible feedback to IBSVI when using touch devices for reading. The overlay was tested in a usability study, and the results showed the role of tangibility in leveraging accessibility of touch devices and supporting reading for IBSVI.

In this research we designed, developed, and tested a reading system that enables Individuals with Blindness or Severe Visual Impairment (IBSVI) to fuse audio, tactile landmarks, and spatial information in order to read. This system renders electronic text documents on iPad-type devices, and reads aloud each word touched by the user's finger. A tactile overlay on the iPad screen helps IBSVI to navigate a page, furnishing a framework of tactile landmarks to give IBSVI a sense of place on the page. As the user moves her finger along the tangible pattern of the overlay, the text on the iPad screen that is touched is rendered audibly using a text-to-speech bsynthesizer.

In this paper, we introduce a novel interaction model for reading text documents depending on situated touch. This interaction modality targets Individuals with Blindness or Severe Visual Impairment (IBSVI). We aim to provide IBSVI with an effective reading tool that enables them to use their spatial abilities while reading. We used an iPad device and augmented it with a static tactile overlay to display the text to serve as a kind of spatial landmark space for the IBSVI. The text is rendered audibly in response to user's touch. Two user studies, with IBSVI participants, were conducted to test the system. The first study was a laboratory-controlled study, and the second one was a longitudinal study. These studies showed that while the approach is new to the users' experience, it is a promising direction to enable self-paced spatial reading for IBSVI.