Hi Kate,

I can't answer this fully because my flight is about to leave for San Antonio. We surveyed professors of computer science and professors in information schools around the US.  These were professors in all subfields not just software design.  Over asked Andy Ko too add more detail.

The research Andy Ko mentioned was published at SIGCSE 2018.  You can find the published article here: Who Teaches Accessibility? A Survey of US Computing Faculty.  They used Mechanical Turk to crowdsource email addresses of over 14,000 faculty in computer science, information science and other interdisciplinary computing departments at 4-year universities and colleges.

Since then, they have done additional work considering how to do professional development that was published at SIGCSE 2019: Teaching Accessibility: A Design Exploration of Faculty Professional Development at Scale.

Thanks for the question Kate! Richard and Brianna did a great job covering the basics of the study. The scope was quite broad; we were interested in learning about *any* form of teaching about accessibility in a computer science or information science class, not just software design. The survey showed that many people, at particular universities, are teaching about accessibility across the curriculum, but it’s mostly being taught in HCI and software engineering.

Hi Karen,

I think there are a number of strategies and models that can be used.  We had a pre-symposium workshop at SIGCSE 2019 in Minneapolis on this topic.  About 45 people attended the workshop and we are coming out with a summary proceedings soon.  It was good to see a variety of approaches presented at the workshop.  Examples including using accessibility at a theme in a CS intro course,  incorporating accessibility topics in web design/development courses, incorporating accessibility in software engineering courses, and using accessibility as a theme in a capstone design course.  We feel it is good to include accessibility topics in a wide range of courses, rather than making a specific course about it.  

Thanks, Richard, for your response.  I'll look forward to reading the summary proceedings from SIGCSE.  

Two things struck me as I read your comment - 1) that if you start off with accessibility as a theme in a CS intro course, it might set a student expectation that accessibility is something to be considered in every course (or aspect of software/technology design).  Those expectations might even "encourage" some professors to add this theme.  2) I'm not a computer scientist, but I've found that grounding accessibility principles within other types of curricula and classroom practice made it more meaningful and more central to course/PD learning goals.  I strongly support your recommendation to include accessibility in a wide range of course instead of teaching about it separately. 

For an example of a freely available curriculum that integrates accessibility into a mainstream course on website design, link to "WebD2" from http://www.washington.edu/accessit/index.html

It demonstrates how accessibility can be integrated throughout a course. We need more examples of this approach to share with computing faculty.

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for your comments.  It appears we have a chicken and egg problem. Generally, graduate programs that prepare CS faculty don't teach accessibility topics, so faculty do have the background.  Mainstream textbooks don't cover much accessibility either.  In this way the lack of accessibility content in courses perpetuates.  There are a number of avenues to change this: job requirements for industry ask for accessibility knowledge, ABET, the CS accreditation board lists this as a high priority topic, and sample syllabuses from ACM and other organizations contain accessibility content.  TeachAccess.org is working on all three.  This is a relatively slow process, but it is moving in the right direction.

Richard

Although progress has been made, we have a long way to go to make IT procured, developed and used on postsecondary campuses accessible to faculty, students, staff, and visitors with disabilities, as evidenced by the growing number of civil rights complaints and resolutions (with the Department of Justice and Office of Civil Rights) regarding inaccessible IT on campuses nationwide. I am Co-PI of AccessComputing but also direct Accessible Technology Services at the University of Washington. Major barriers to IT that result in remediation by our disability services office for specific students are related to PDFs (mostly scanned-in images whose content is not accessible to technology that reads text to individuals who are blind and to those who have Dyslexia or other reading-related learning disabilities) and videos (lack of captions or unedited computer-created captions on YouTube). So, besides encouraging faculty members to teach about accessibility we need to encourage all faculty to use accessible IT in the delivery of online content.

I couldn't agree more. My son is dyslexic and is now entering his senior year at UMass Amherst. Although there have been a few quirks in the system, UMass has been terrifically supportive in general and he is doing well. When you mention that about PDFs I vaguely remember hearing about that in the NINETIES - I'm still stunned that these issues remain in such early stages of being remedied. Kudos to you for your work and I've learned a lot. So appreciative of your investment in sharing on the video Showcase!

There are a few universities that teach dedicated courses on accessibility. We have one at the University of Washington Information School, but only teach it occasionally, when our experts are available. This is one of the big challenges of scarce expertise: without more faculty with this expertise, it's hard to teach deep content on it, but without teaching that deep content, we won't have experts. The community is very much bootstrapping right now.

This does sound like a really challenging problem. I wonder whether faculty in disability studies or special education might collaborate with CS faculty who don't necessarily have this expertise to create cross-listed or interdisciplinary classes on the topic...

Through AccessComputing, I work with a nationwide group of students with disabilities who are studying computing fields.  Over time, I've worked with some students who are interested in learning more about accessibility but don't have courses at their schools on the topic.  Some of those students have done independent projects where they've taught themselves or sought out REUs or other internships where they can learn about accessibility.